First of all, this was an email conversation between Ryan Dahl and Zed Shaw. That you know. What you probably don't know is that Ryan first posted this tweet [0] about rewriting Zed's http parser. Zed then responded twice [1] & [2], vehemently. Ryan then responded with a single "?" to Zed's outbursts. That is when Zed said this: "@ryah And don't make me bust out the fucking email you sent me trying to trick me into giving you a MIT license. I swear I'll trash you." [3] Then shortly after another attack [4]. Ryan then again responded somewhat confused: "@zedshaw http-parser uses nginx's url parser, and your external c api (it's a good api) but it's not a modified ver. of mongrel's http11. ??" [5] After that he offered up the above link with the email conversation Zed alluded to [6].
If you know anything about the http parser, you would know that it was written by Ryan and is no longer an issue. That is why the license was changed, why give attribution to Zed if he didn't write anything? Not to mention after the above outburst.
The title of this post is wrong, misleading, and linkbait.
[0]: https://twitter.com/ryah/status/69557901546631168
[1]: http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69583774119239681
[2]: http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69584110305284097
[3]: http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69584284339544064
[4]: http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69618172252274688
But back on topic... Even if Ryan really rewritten all of the original mongrel's code by hand, then there is still issue with nginx-based portions. Why there is no attribution to Igor Sysoev?
If it was rewritten, with all new code, why would there need to be attribution?
However, Zed Shaw really tempts me to make time to get involved in open source, especially in projects that will have some tangential connection to him. That's because I haven't been in a really good flame war with a worthy opponent since the old usenet days. From what I've read, it seems he would be more than worthy and not too hard to provoke. :-)
Just being wrong and giggling when people correct you is level 0 trolling. If you really want to troll you gotta step up your game and do something like any of these:
http://mulletdb.com/ http://livingdouchebag.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/
If you can pull off projects like that, and open source them, then I'll be one of your fans. If all you do is try to provoke me, then I'll just end up making you look like the dumbass you actually are.
(So something like that is what you want? :-)
EDIT: mulletdb.com is better.
That's easily the most bizarre motivation I've heard to get into open source(!) :-)
[0]: https://twitter.com/ryah/status/69554939323629568
[1]: Oh crap, now Zed Shaw's gonna challenge me to a duel.
It sounds like Ryan is saying that he re-wrote it because of technical reasons, when from the email exchange, it is really because of licensing. That's kind of sketchy to me.
Right or wrong, I think that if node was using mongrel/nginx stuff at any point they should still give some attribution. It certainly seems like the code was helpful in getting the project started regardless of the fact that all the code has been rewritten in later releases.
It's interesting that Ryan works for Joyent, who is doing a major push into Node.js services–including "Commercial Node.js distribution" ... I'm not a license expert but it seems that MIT would be better for that.
Is there any background on why this was posted in a gist (and why it was submitted to HN)?
http://bettween.com/ryah/zedshaw/May-07-2011/May-15-2011/asc
Disclosure: I know both http-parser and nginx fairly well. I'm one of the 'other Node contributors'. :-)
