GPL versus BSD
[ Sorry for cross-posting, I'm not a legal expert in any sense, so
contributions by d-legal folks are very welcome. ]
On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 01:55:17PM +1300, Hamish wrote:
> Fwd. from the grass devel mailing list. I think the Debian folks have
> a better understanding than most of the issues, problems, and solutions
> dealing with a multitude of open source licenses, and might have some
> advice here. The development version of GRASS (6.1-cvs) now has basic
> support for SWIG interfaces.
>
IANAL (and not a d-legal aficionado, so keep all with a grain of salt)
but as already discussed briefly on the grass-dev list, there is simply
no smooth way to have a BSD program 'integrating' code from a GPL project.
Indeed, the resulting code MUST result in a GPL licensed product.
I see only few ways to achieve the goal of a better compatibility:
* Encapsulating in a LGPL library stuff which could be useful for other
projects. This would be the preferred way, but also the most
complicated one, because it required a long and slow job of
refinement and probably major architectural changes.
IMHO this _should_ be the way to go...
* Double licensing GRASS (this commonly done in commercial world for
some products, e.g. MySQL or in some special cases as AOLserver (1)).
This requires ALL contributors do agree about that. I don't know
if it would be practical and suitable. The second license would
be a Mozilla-like and would allow use of part of the code in
BSD-like project, BUT ALSO IN non-free software as well. As a
free developer I would vote against, honestly. Issuing a specific license
to allow free general use and avoid proprietary abuse is a damn
difficult beast, BTW.
* Maybe (?) issueing a FLOSS exception. This is suboptimal and very prone to
censorship and errors. Surely better than the previous strategy, because limits
the kind of license for the resulting program. One example
I know well is the FLOSS exception by MySQL AB for libmysqlclient12+
which is GPL. See
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-floss-license-exception.html
That has been issued when libmysqlclient moved from LGPL to GPL.
Writing a FLOSS execption is another damn difficult thing, and
indeed GRASS is NOT a library...
Of course, finally
* Changing GRASS license in something different. In no way different from
the double licensing option, indeed.
I would also ask why the target software wouln't be licensable under GPL
but that's another story :-)
>
> The place where I've run into problems most recently is working to
> develop an interface to make agent based modeling tools available to
> GRASS and GIS (in GRASS) available to open source agent based
> modeling platforms. A major system, with which we are working is
> released under BSD. A very useful interface we'd like to use is
> (SWIG) released under MIT. Because of the work the ABM folks do and
> clients they have, they feel that they cannot make their software
> GPL--although it is open-source licensed. They feel strongly about
> being open source and about being ethical with regards to licenses--
> both commendable things. The licensing incompatibility is making it
> difficult to find a way to make GRASS and Java ABM platforms interact
> in a useful way. Not impossible, I hope, but it has added a
> significant layer of complication and considerably restricted the
> ways in which we can develop this interaction.
>
> I'm not saying that we should make GRASS non-GPL, but hoping that we
> can find productive avenues to work with other open-source platforms
> that are not GPL (expanding the user, developer, and support base as
> well as making GRASS better).
>
--
Francesco P. Lovergine
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