Q: Why this library?

A: Because I was shaping new versioning system, rather an experiment for myself
than anything dedicated for a real-world usage, and I wanted to break it up to
lesser steps. And I thought that other people could use some of the
functionality as well. First, I had librcs on my mind, but it showed up that it
would be nice to have means for generic manipulation of stuff, so that I could
do more format-specific libraries and so on. So it turns out that PaVS will be
merely a smart frontend for this library ;-).


Q: Why this licence?

A: Usually, I prefer GPL. But usually, I do applications. With a "smart"
libraries it is similiar, if effort significant enough went to it and it is
worth it, GPL is just fine. But I believe that libraries merely serving as a
certain frameworks (librev) or file decoders (librcs) should noone have to
ever re-create, for the sake of interoperability and just because it is too
trivial and annoying to do it again and again, be it a monster hating free
software and wanting to destroy us all (-- Linus Torvalds [about klibc licence
choice (BSD ;)], loosely quoted). Applications using this library are
encouraged to use GPL or a similiar free software licence.


Q: I have read the licence and even though it looks as BSD licence, it appears
to be modified somehow...?

A: I do not have particular fondness of the no-endorsement clause, and I even
considered removing it from the licence altogether (effectively turning it into
a MIT licence). I can see its usefulness as well as its harm. And while this
clause prevents big commercial products using your product's name in their
advertisement, I have nothing against various tiny opensource clones of my
library openly advertising that they are based on librev. Thus, I have chosen a
compromise and exempted products licenced ONLY under open-source free (OSI
approved) licences from the no-endorsement clause. If anyone wants to (dual-)
licence their product under a closed-source licence, they should ask me for a
permission. And I openly say that as long as I will be librev maintainer, I
will want some reasonable amount of money in exchange for the permission, so
that they will effectively support PaVS development if they want to use it in
their advertisement.


Q: Why are you using your own diff implementation?

A: Because I found no other under BSD licence! It's pathetic. There's libgdiff
of GNU diff, under GPL. Then there is libsvn_diff, which is under Apache/BSD
licence, and thus it would taint librev in such a way that it would be
incompatible with GPL. And that's about it. OpenCM has some fragment of some
code, but it is incomplete. I might very well use it in future, though.