Re: NSE: IDL parser

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 09:00:43AM -0500, Ron wrote:
> One concern I have with using the .idl files that's probably better
> to raise now rather than later: are there any licensing issues? I'm
> not a lawyer, and I don't have a clear understanding of the different
> licences in play here, but I believe that Samba is GPL, which makes
> the .idl files GPL (I think).

Hi Ron.  Thanks for bringing this up, as it is definitely worth
investigating.  Note that with the strategy under discussion, we
wouldn't be distributing the .idl files or the program we use to
convert them to LUA (such as PIDL).  But our generated LUA files would
be derived from the .idl versions.

Where did the .idl files originally come with?  They seem to be like C
header files in that they simply define an API.  They just contain
stuff like:

        /******************/
        /* Function: 0x51 */
        WERROR spoolss_DeletePrinterDataEx(
                [in,ref] policy_handle *handle,
                [in] [string,charset(UTF16)] uint16 key_name[],
                [in] [string,charset(UTF16)] uint16 value_name[]
        );

        /******************/
        /* Function: 0x52 */
        WERROR spoolss_DeletePrinterKey(
        );

Did the Samba folks actually reverse engineer every function to obtain
these, or did they get these IDL files from somewhere else?

I think the first and best goal is to try and find the files under a
permissive license such as no-advertising-clause BSD.

Another solution is to recreate the files, though that could be a huge
pain, depending on how it is done.

There is also the question of whether the files are copyrightable in
the first place.  At least in the US, there must be at least _some_
creativity involved in generating a work to make it eligible for
copyright protection.  Given that we aren't lawyers, we should try to
avoid making such a determination ourselves.  But we can ask the
source whether the claim copyright protection on the data.  If they
don't, we can use it in an unrestricted manner.

So the ultimate question is: where do these .IDL files come from and
is there are public domain or BSD-licensed source for them?

Cheers,
-F
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