On 01.08.2015 19:34, monkeynut wrote:
I have now spent weeks reading the FSF, GPLv3, BSD, Boost etc. license pages and guides and all sorts of stuff. Plenty of (people claiming to be) lawyers who all disagree about what to do and where I stand (most of it involving disagreements about derivative works). I would love to just get back to design and development, something I'm actually good at!
The standard interpretation is that derivations (including software that uses the library) must be released under the same license, or a compatible one. In the case of graph-tool, that would be the GPLv3 or any later version.
The obvious solution would be just to GPL everything but given the amount of pain the draconian and anti-liberal GPLv3 has given me, I don't want to inflict that on anyone else in the future if possible. Additionally, there are a number of people I would like to work with who would be unable due to contractual contraints to risk using my project if it were GPL.
It only inflicts pain if you (or others) desire or leave open the possibility of using it as part of proprietary code. It is pretty much the whole point of the GPL to make this impossible, or at least very difficult.
Has anybody had a similar situation and how have you resolved it? Can anybody help? Tiago, if you could give me any advice about your intentions behind choosing GPLv3 over e.g. LGPL and how my project relates to that (is this something we should discuss off-line)?
My choice for using the GPL is the same, I presume, than anyone else that leans towards copyleft. I want don't want anyone to be restricted to use or modify the library or any variations by any third party. If you are free to choose your own licence, using anything else means you don't care about further restrictions being imposed. The LGPL makes an exception for just linking (importing) the library, which can make strategic sense in some cases, but I judged it not to be the case for graph-tool. Best, Tiago -- Tiago de Paula Peixoto <tiago@skewed.de>