mimemagic
mimemagic
| mimemagic | mimemagic | |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | 2 | |
| 370 | 9 | |
| - | - | |
| 4.1 | 4.1 | |
| about 3 years ago | about 3 years ago | |
| Ruby | Ruby | |
| MIT License | MIT License |
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For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
mimemagic
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MimeMagic versions prior to 0.3.6 have been yanked from RubyGems and it's GPL 2.0 now
pretty clear that they copied GPL code, needed to relicense as GPL. they did a booboo https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues/97
His initial commit from 12 years ago referred to ‘shared-mime-info’ in this line: Blame: https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/blame/master/script/freedesktop.org.xml
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Removed Gem “Breaks” Rails ActiveStorage
Not so fast in that claim.
First of all the infringing file is https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/blob/master/script/freede.... Sure, it is in XML. But it contains a tremendous amount of free-form text, specific sets of pattern matching rules for the data types, and so on. It is a compilation of sometimes original research on the best ways to detect file types. Ruby has other mime libraries. The reason why this one was chosen is that its detection algorithms make better choices. And the reason that they make better choices is that they copied the decision rules from a GPLed project.
But even if it were a simple compilation, it still is not guaranteed that there is no copyright. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation for an introductory article on what can and can't be copyrighted about a compilation. And one of the elements that matters is creativity in the selection of the material. A set of rules with a lot of "look for this" while leaving out various reasonable thats that don't work so well shows considerable creativity.
That said, a judge may decide otherwise. You never know until a judge decides. But I would not presume that there is no copyright interest to be had here.
- Mimemagic Is Now GPLv2
- Mimemagic gem yank disrupts Rails installations
mimemagic
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Ruby off the Rails: Code library yanked over license blunder
Note that:
> On Thursday 26 March, mimemagic was updated again to v0.4.1, which restored the MIT license and removed the GPL covered code – theFreedesktop.org Shared Mime Types database. Users must now provide that themselves.
More information here:
https://github.com/jellybob/mimemagic/pull/3
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Removed Gem “Breaks” Rails ActiveStorage
That approach is roughly being taken in this fork: https://github.com/jellybob/mimemagic/issues/1
With the difference that the gem will by default download the XML file at runtime, with the option of using a local copy specified by an environment variable. I guess they are operating under the belief that including any GPL file taints the library, or perhaps they're just playing it safe.
What are some alternatives?
gemstash - A RubyGems.org cache and private gem server
compliance-backend - :construction: Insights Compliance backend gets reports, and offers everything to know about them through an API
savant-core - This is the main project for the Savant build tool
Ruby on Rails - Ruby on Rails
rupy - HTTP App. Server and JSON DB - Shared Parallel (Atomic) & Distributed
mimemagic - Mime type detection in ruby via file extension or file content
mimemagic - Powerful and versatile MIME sniffing package using pre-compiled glob patterns, magic number signatures, XML document namespaces, and tree magic for mounted volumes, generated from the XDG shared-mime-info database.