[Coin-discuss] COIN-OR licences again...

[Soeren Sonnenburg]

Dear all,

I apologize for bringing up this discussion again, but is there any
chance that the COIN OR projects under is dual licensed under CPL *and*
the GPL? (The CPL is GPL incompatible and thus COIN-OR with 90% of the
open source programs, not even *linking* to a CPL based library is OK).

I am asking as I would love to see the COIN libraries to be more
widespread, i.e. 

a) I am interested in packaging some of the coin-or programs for
debian. For example I already packaged dsdp (as it is GPL). It is not
clear whether the CPL license is debian free software guidelinces
conform so I would very much like to see coin-or projects GPL dual
licensed... Note that debian based distributions have the biggest market
share among the linux distributions - so coin-or could be pre-installed
and may actually be used by a larger audience.

b) I personally am looking for a free linear optimizer (like Clp) or
even the Open Solver Interface (OSI) to be used in my shogun toolbox
(www.shogun-toolbox.org) to at some point get rid of a cplex dependency.
I know I could use glpk or lpsolve but as COIN is widely known in the OR
community I would prefer seeing its projects to be dual licensed. And
OSI is a great idea, but what does it help if you are not allowed to use
it in an open source project due to licensing conflicts?

Please note that it is in any case not a good idea to use a GPL
incompatible license (see e.g.
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html)
After all most of the projects are GPL and a further incompatibility
between open source licenses does not really help...
Maybe this was one of the reasons why firefox etc are now dual licensed
under GPL/LGPL/MPL... I understand that IBM started this project and
some people simply did not like the GPL and *intentionally* choose the
CPL. The community just suffers from conflicting licenses so I hope we
can overcome this...

Soeren
-- 
Soeren Sonnenburg - Fraunhofer FIRST      Tel: +49 (30) 6392 1882
Kekulestr. 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany       Fax: +49 (30) 6392 1805
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