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

[Soeren Sonnenburg]

On Sun, 2008-04-06 at 21:25 -0600, Brian Borchers wrote:
> >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.

So this is a call to the owners of the different sub-projects: Please
make your license GPL compatible...

> 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.

How about LGPL or BSD without the advertisement clause? I mean there is
many GPL compatible licenses
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses - I am
not religious about things to be GPL - just keeping compatibility is
enough...

> 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

Indeed this may affect motivation a lot.

> 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.  

I agree it is very unlikely that they will start suing you...

> 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.  

I don't see a problem in the lapack license... And even if there was
one, atlas is the preferred (potentially faster) replacement.

> 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.  

Well it would certainly help if projects one by one start to dual
license using a GPL compatible license... It would then at least be
possible to rewrite GPL conflicting parts...instead of a full nogo.

> 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.  

Why should they care? Coin-or projects are mostly libraries and as such
usable only inside other programs. As the majority of software is GPL
http://freshmeat.net/stats/ (63% - looks like I quite a bit
overestimated that number in my first mail) - coin-or's use is limited
due to the CPL (which 0.25% of the project at freshmeat use).

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