While I've been a fervent supporter of the GPL for many years I'm on board with a change to a simple BSD or MIT style license. Initially I was skeptical about the need to move away from the LGPL but in the world of embedded systems it's very common to make changes to the core codebase in order to work on various platforms. Under the LGPL such changes would have to be tracked, checked for IP conflicts, and made available. This requirement may very well end up being so onerous that it may vary well push companies to adopt a more suitably licensed alternative over RIOT.
On Wed, Dec 3, 2014, 2:14 PM Thomas Watteyne <watte...@eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > Emmanuel, > I support the change to BSD. One of the reasons is that OpenWSN is also on > BSD, so integration of the different code bases might be easier when both > have the same license. > Thomas > > On Wednesday, December 3, 2014, Emmanuel Baccelli < > emmanuel.bacce...@inria.fr> wrote: > >> Dear RIOTers, >> >> we have been receiving an increasing amount of negative feedback from >> various companies concerning the practical usability of our LGPL license in >> their context, being a show-stopper. >> >> For this reason, INRIA, Freie Universitaet (FU) Berlin and Hamburg >> University of Applied Science (HAW) are currently considering changing the >> license of their contributions to RIOT to a less restrictive license (i.e. >> BSD, potentially as soon as next release). >> >> Such a switch to BSD is betting that the effect of a potentially smaller >> percentage of user/devel contributing back to the master branch will be >> dwarfed by the effect of a user/devel community growing much bigger and >> quicker. This seems doable considering the current momentum around RIOT. >> >> In a second phase, if such a license switch takes place for INRIA/FU/HAW >> contributions, we would then contact other contributors individually, to >> check their status concerning a similar switch for their own contributions. >> >> But in the first place, we would like to debate this topic. In >> particular: is anyone violently opposing the idea of migrating to a less >> restrictive license, such as BSD? If so, why? On the other hand, if you >> explicitly support the license change, feel free to indicate this as well. >> Please send your opinion to the list before Dec. 10th. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Emmanuel >> > _______________________________________________ > devel mailing list > devel@riot-os.org > http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/devel >
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