Gangplank (http://gangplank.org/) is a CMC system which I wrote, starting on November 30, 1992. It supports real-time communication between users, currently using a text-based user interface derived from the CONNECT interface. As such, it looks very similar to Clover and lily. It runs as an Internet server which implements the standard TELNET protocol, so no special client program is necessary for users. Server-side processing provides input editing, input history and terminal-handling features over the TELNET connection for standard ANSI terminals. It also implements LosslessDetach using the TimingMark option. This code has been in (light) production use since early 1993. The server runs as a single process using a select() loop, and runs on a number of Unix-like platforms. It is fast, efficient and stable. However, it lacks a number of features lily users may take for granted.

Gangplank was originally known as Phoenix, which was a closed-source personal CMC project of mine. (Actually, for the first few months, it was known as "conf" while in search of a name.) Originally written from scratch in C, the server was soon ported to C++ -- without using any standard C++ class libraries. I renamed the system to Gangplank on the ninth anniversary of the codebase (November 30, 2001) to coincide with the initial Open Source release of the code under the QPL license. This license does not allow for easy reuse of the code in other projects, and it is incompatible with the GPL. However, I'll consider making parts of the code available under another license upon request. (For now, I'm not planning to relicense the entire project, through that may well happen at some point in the future.)

The name "Gangplank" was chosen for one simple reason -- I had managed to register the "gangplank.org" domain, and I didn't have any alternatives I liked better. I wanted a different name to distinguish the closed-source code from the open-source code, and I wanted one with an available domain name -- that left me with fairly restricted options to choose from. "Gangplank" was the best name I was able to come up with.

-- DevenCorzine - 03 Nov 2003

fyi, lily isn't released under the GPL. It's released under the Apache Software License.

-- CoKe - 03 Nov 2003

I didn't claim that lily was released under the GPL. I was just pointing out the incompatibility in case anyone might be tempted to combine it with GPL code (such as certain lily clients).

Even if the Apache Software License is compatible with the QPL (and I don't know offhand if it is or not), Gangplank's code might be inconvenient to incorporate into lily because of the QPL's requirement to distribute all modifications as patches. That's where relicensing parts of the Gangplank code might make sense, and I'll consider any such requests on a case-by-case basis.

-- DevenCorzine - 03 Nov 2003
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