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

[Soeren Sonnenburg]

On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 11:31 -0400, Ted Ralphs wrote:

Ted,

> 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.

I agree, for pure users it does not matter, as they won't mess with the
code. In the case of COIN-OR it is different though, as it is made for
developers who like to use and extend the code...

> 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 

Could you give a reason why this is unlikely? That it has been discussed
a couple of times just underlines that there is a need to change
things...

> 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.

I would not want this to end up in a discussion whether the GPL valid,
good or bad. Lets simply accept (or tolerate) the FSF's position here
and find a solution with which everyone, IBM, COIN-OR developers and
(potential) COIN-OR users are happy.

> 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!

Well that does not really sound dispassionate. If the reason why dual
licensing is not an option is that there is a strong dislike against
any GPL compatible license from the people in charge here, then nothing
will change. If the aim is to see coin-or projects widely used however
it is important to consider dual licensing with another more compatible
license. As I guess the goal for IBM to open sourcing this project was
so see it widely used and extended I would hope that a solution can be
found.

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