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

[Ted Ralphs]

As a point of information relevant to this thread, there is an effort 
underway by members of the Technical Leadership Council and others to 
develop a set of RPM's and .debs for Linux that will include the vast 
majority of the projects. Of course, we will not be able to link with 
any third-party libraries that are GPL'd, but nevertheless, we have been 
able to build distributable binaries of most of the projects. I don't 
think the fact that the binaries will be under the CPL should impact 
most users that much, though clearly the license conflict is less than 
ideal. Stay tuned for more details.

As for the dual licensing idea, that has been discussed on and off for a 
long time and there is very little chance of it happening. However, we 
will keep the conversation going. To date, there has not been universal 
agreement in the legal community that the clauses in the GPL that forbid 
dynamic linking are enforceable, but for now, we are not in a position 
to test those waters. Hopefully, someone will do so at some point and we 
will have a legitimate and dispassionate legal interpretation rather 
than the FSFs self-interested one. One can argue that encouraging wider 
use of the GPL is not actually good for open source, but it is a 
practical reality that much of the world's OS software is GPL'd, so that 
is the reality we have to deal with. Thanks for your support!

Cheers,

Ted (Chair, Technical Leadership Council)
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lehigh University
(610)758-4784
ted at lehigh dot edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted