[ 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]