[Coin-discuss] Would it be possible to relicense parts of COIN-OR under an Apache License?

[Pedro F. Giffuni]

Hello;

I have recently become interested in the migration of OpenOffice
from SUN/Oracle to an Apache Project: a process that has also
been backed up by IBM, that will be contributing it's own
derivative Lotus Symphony to the Project.

As part of the IP cleanup that OpenOffice has to do, we will
likely remove the LGPL'd solver (lp_solve) for coinmp(CPL),
which includes CPL and CGL (both EPL).

The Apache Software Foundation has some rather strict rules
concerning the licenses we are allowed to include:

http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html

Both CLP and EPL are considered Category B, which is better
that LGPL (Category X), so we can use them and redistribute
them as binaries.

This is all good, and I think using the COIN-LP software in
a massively distributed product like Apache OpenOffice will
be awesome, however we could do a much wider distribution
and promotion if it were available under an Apache License:

http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

This license is very popular among developers, it's
commercial-friendly and is recommended by the FSF as
it is compatible with the GPL3.

Just thought I'd drop a line and let you guys discuss it :).

best regards,

Pedro.