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Re: [science-iwg] What about LGPL?
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Jay,
Re-licensing is an option of course. We did that for a group of projects
in LocationTech. In those cases, the copyright was consolidated to a
single organization in each case so re-licensing fortunately did not
require asking all authors for permission. Asking each author can be
incredibly onerous.
Another important precedent here has been the Polarsys working group
which received board approval for distributing LGPL software. In that
case, it had to be done under a name/namespace/brand other than Eclipse.
I think it's fair to say this was a very big deal and hard earned.
Mike's a better person to comment on if things have changed regarding
LGPL at the Eclipse Foundation today. I suspect not.
LocationTech is a milder example. It has board permission to distribute
software under MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses in addition to EPL. It also
has permission to use some specific LGPL licensed third party prerequisites.
Andrew
On 12/04/14 09:29, Jay Jay Billings wrote:
Everyone,
Now that the draft of the charter is out of the way, can we discuss
the issues with LGPL science codes and the SWG?
Let's not talk about the GPL. Forget about that one.
Lots of science codes are LGPL. The authors normally pick that license
because they want something more open to commercial use than the GPL,
but they don't really know about other licenses.
I just re-read Mike's 2009 article about LGPL in Eclipse to refresh my
memory of the Foundation's stance,
http://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/lgpl-pain/ .
I'm only bringing it up because we should probably have an answer for
this question ready when scientists come knocking. Mike, Andrew any
thoughts?
Jay
