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

[Brian Borchers]

>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?

This is certainly possible, but it's up to the owners of the copyright on
the different projects to decide that they want to do it.  Note that 
"owners of copyright" and "authors" aren't synonyms.

For example, in the case of CSDP, my university decided that they
shared ownership of the software with me (although they don't claim
copyright on words that I write, e.g.  articles, books, or whatever.)
They were willing to license CSDP under the CPL and make it available
through COIN-OR.  They weren't willing to see it released under the
GPL.

This policy hadn't been made clear to me (in fact there was
no policy) before I brought the issue up in the process of getting
CSDP released through COIN-OR.  My reaction to it is to be somewhat
less inclined to put substantial effort into software development
projects in the future and to put more effort into writing words,
because with my writing I have control over the copyright.  Then
again, it also provides me with additional motivation to increase my
weekly running mileage and improve my 5K time...

It happens that I released earlier versions of CSDP under the CPL and
GPL at a time when I thought that I owned the copyright to software
that I developed and our university had no policy on software
copyrights.  I can't control what others do with that older software,
but I've actively discouraged its redistribution.  I suppose that in
theory my university might claim a copyright violation and take
someone (and me too!) to court for redistributing the software under
the GPL.  This would be a horrible legal mess.  However, since they
don't see any way to make money with this software, they probably 
wouldn't care.  

There was another significant issue that made GPL an inappropriate
license to use for CSDP- the software simply won't run without LAPACK
libraries, and LAPACK is distributed under a BSD style license that
isn't GPL compatible.  Thus binaries of CSDP couldn't be distributed
under the GPL.  

With respect to the "connected component" of COIN-OR projects that are 
tightly interrelated, you'd need to convince all of the owners (including
IBM among others) to license their software under the GPL.  

I would be interested to see whether some of the less GPL-religious
Linux distributions would deal with distributing COIN-OR projects
under the CPL.  I doubt that the majority of the projects will ever
be available under the GPL.