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

[Ted Ralphs]

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Pedro F. Giffuni <giffunip at tutopia.com>wrote:

>
>
> --- On Sat, 10/8/11, Pedro F. Giffuni <giffunip at tutopia.com> wrote:
>
> > --- On Sat, 10/8/11, Soeren Sonnenburg wrote:
> >
> > > If I was you I would give up and take
> > > what is there. COIN OR people will
> > > never re-license under a GPL compatible license like
> > > the Apache License, Version 2.0.
>

Just to make the situation clear, the COIN-OR Foundation does not own *any*
of the code base of COIN-OR. Therefore, it is the owners of individual
contributions that make the licensing decisions. IBM owns enough of the code
base that we effectively cannot re-license anything without their support.
Even with their support, re-licensing is a bigger undertaking than it might
appear.

The role of the foundation is limited to lobbying owners and also
recommending the use of certain licenses over others, mainly for the reasons
of keeping all projects license-compatible. In the case of the effort to
re-license under the GPL, we just didn't have the support to make it
happen.

> If that's the problem, there are small workarounds to make
> > both sides happy: we are indeed considering other software
> > that is not considered GPL compatible. In this case I
> > would find an advertisement clause quite acceptable.
>

I can't speak for IBM, but I would say that "GPL compatibility" is not
necessarily the issue. The GPL itself is not a viable option for many use
cases. There are plenty of organizations that will not consider using GPL'd
code for fear of litigation and you certainly cannot embed GPL'd code in a
closed source commercial product, something that is allowed under the terms
of the EPL.

Of course, dual licensing is a solution, but I personally do not favor the
GPL on philosophical grounds. As Pedro said, you cannot force freedom on
people. The Apache License looks more reasonable, but I will say that just
because IBM supports the use of Apache for some of their codes does not mean
it will support it's use for COIN. These decisions are made on a
case-by-case basis.

Cheers,

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted
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