MSN contact grab script included in 'meta' contact grabber

Via phpdeveloper.org I track the latest phpclasses releases and given my work on contact grabbing scripts I was interested to see that a new contact grabber script has been posted.

I haven't tried it yet but apparently it can connect to hotmail, yahoo, gmail, orkut, rediff and myspace. It is an impressive collection of scripts. It uses libgmailer to get the gmail contacts just like I chose to do.

It also uses a file called msn_contact_grab.class.php to get the hotmail contacts which rings some bells. Sure enough on closer inspection it's the file I created to fetch a MSN messenger contact list. Except it's outdated.

Generally speaking I wouldn't have a problem with the script being included in another project. In fact I would encourage it. In this instance though there are a few problems.

Inaccuracies: This package is being promoted as fetching hotmail contacts for which it presumably relies on my script. My script does not fetch hotmail contacts. It fetches MSN messenger contacts. Although frequently similar they are not the same.

Updates: When you're releasing third party scripts as part of your project updates are going to be slow to filter through. It's a shame that just days after the package was released it already needs updating.

Licensing: The whole package has been released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Given that the msn contact grabbing class has never been released under such terms is this licensing appropriate? I would argue that it isn't.

I spent quite a bit of time considering licensing when I first released the script. Rather than go with the GPL I decided to stick with simply 'free' to reflect the licensing of the original script from which my script was derived. I didn't feel it was appropriate to decide on a licence even though the script was now significantly different to the original version.

Contact: If the author of the new phpclasses package had made contact all the above problems could have been avoided. In fact I would probably have promoted the package here on the blog. It's good to talk.

These are all small things but I highlight them because each one could easily have been dealt with. I've now sent off an email and suspect that everything can be easily resolved. It's just a shame it has to be done after the fact.

Has anyone had similar experiences? How have you made improvements to prevent similar problems emerging? I think the first thing I need to do is make it easier for people to contact me. Secondly, I need to take another look at the licensing.