Yesterday Apple Bonjour (http://bonjour.macosforge.org/) has been (http://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwin-dev/2006/Aug/msg00067.html) released (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/2359256) under the Apache License 2.0, replacing the old much criticized (because non-free) APSL licensing.

What does this mean for Avahi (http://avahi.org/)? First of all although the Apache License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_license) is much better than the APSL (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html) it still isn’t GPL compatible (at least in the eyes of the FSF), which effectively means that Bonjour still cannot be used by more than 66% of the Free Software (http://freshmeat.net/stats/#license) projects available. Secondly Avahi is more powerful in most areas than Bonjour ever was. (In fact, there is only a single feature where Bonjour surpasses us: writable “Wide Area DNS-SD”). Avahi uses all the “hot” Free technologies like D-Bus (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus) and a has much better integration in the Linux networking subsystem. Avahi is more secure (chroot()…) Avahi is compatible API- and ABI-wise with Bonjour, but not the other way round. Avahi is now part of every major Linux distribution.

Avahi is actively developed. The aforementioned Wide Area DNS-SD is currently being worked on by Federico Lucifredi. Since I will write my master thesis about mDNS scalability a lot of additional development will be done for Avahi in the next month.

In short: Avahi is here to stay. Apple’s move to the Apache license is too little, too late.

Update: the Bonjour client libraries are BSD licensed, so the 66% argument doesn’t hold.