Also not a licensing expert or lawyer, I think a change that breaks the barriers to use of software or otherwise makes it more accessible for people is ultimately a good thing.
However, a licensing choice of change, which carries a symbolic value, among others, can break barriers for some people and build them for the other. A license is a sort of interface so, perhaps, that's a case "to imitate Larry Wall" and choose a dual MIT/(L)GPL licencing. MIT is ok, btw. At the very least, choice of license becomes a non-issue for me if I decide to release, e.g., lua bindings to libmarpa. On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 6:10 AM, Jeffrey Kegler < jeffreykeg...@jeffreykegler.com> wrote: > I want to ask opinions about two licensing changes I am thinking of > > 1.) Switching Libmarpa to the MIT/Lua license. Currently there are some > companies that forbid their employees to read LGPL code, because of the > danger to their IP in the code that those employees write. In the case of > Libmarpa, I *want* people to read my code -- they can read my papers, and > the code supplements and illustrates those papers, so it makes little sense > to restrict it. Moving to an MIT license means that people will be able to > use the Libmarpa code freely in proprietary code. There is a downside to > this, but the Lua folks and increasingly the open source community seem to > be embracing this trade-off as a win. > > 2.) Changing both Marpa::R2 and Libmarpa so that anyone contributing code > assigns the copyright to me. The upside of this is that I can change the > license. That's also the downside -- I, or someone who managed to legally > take over the copyright from me, would have the right to change to a > proprietary license. I don't want to minimize this danger -- open source > software being taken proprietary is something that happens a lot. > > I think the trade-offs are in favor of copyright assignment to me. My > plan is to use the right to change the license to make licensing more > liberal. And note that current and past versions would remain subject to > the old open-source licenses -- neither I or anyone else has the right to > rescind those licenses. You could always "re-free" the software by > starting over from a fork of a previous open-source version. It's a > hassle, but it can be done if needed. And in a sense, it's a danger you > are already running -- even if I can't change the licensing, I might become > a flaky project leader, with the same practical effect. > > I'm keeping Marpa::R2 on the LGPL, at least for the time being. With > Libmarpa the asymmetry between by completely-open Theory papers and my > LGPL'd code makes the trade-off pretty clear. And nobody but me has made > any significant contribution to Libmarpa. With Marpa::R2, both these > factors are less clear. And in some months I expect it to be replaced with > a Kollos-based Marpa::R3, so that it's not worthwhile to spend a lot of > time rethinking Marpa::R2 licensing. > > A final note: Libmarpa contains some code derived from LGPL'd code written > by others -- GNU's obstack's, and Ben Pfaff's AVL code. This code must and > will remain LGPL'd. > > Thanks, jeffrey > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "marpa parser" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to marpa-parser+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "marpa parser" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to marpa-parser+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
