On 02/02/2022 20:42, Vishesh Handa wrote:
I've noticed that one of the Goals with Beancount v3 is compatibility with other languages, by using protobufs. This is great, however, are there any plans to move away from a *GPL license?
There are no plans and there would need very compelling reasons to only start to think about something like this.
I've been meaning to make a proper mobile front-end for Beancount, which would be integrated with Git, based on the code from another project of mine [1]. However, given that I want to ship this in iOS where GPL licenses can be problematic [2] [3], I wouldn't want to take the risk, even if Martin and all publicly state that it's fine.
IIUC Git Journal is released under the AGPLv3 license, which is just the GPLv3 plus some extra clauses, but it is distributed on the Apple App Store, which seems to contradict the statement that there is any problem in shipping GPL licensed application through the Apple App Store.
So far, I've been reimplementing the subset of Beancount v2 format that I use in Dart but this comes into the question of the API being copyrightable.
I don't see the connection between implementing a parser for a given file format and an API. Even then, APIs are not copyrightable.
At some point, maybe I'll need to explicitly not support the beancount format to not infringe on the license.
This is nonsense.
So, is there any chance we could change the license?
I don't think so.
I checked and the "new core" part of Beancount with the protobufs only has Martin as a contributor, so that part should be straightforward, and that way I can easily test my parser by making it generate the same protobufs.
I don't see how the license of the Beancount v3 parser that generates protobufs may have anything to do with you being able to test a different implementation of the parser against it. The license of Beancount would matter only if you were to redistribute Beancount code, not if use it to as a reference implementation to test your code.
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