Hi Matthias! > I thought that we already decided to exclude exotic licenses.
Yes. GPL + Linker Exception is not exotic. > With respect to this specific license: > > (1) We cannot use the license because the license text is specific to > eCos (e.g., "eCos is distributed [...]"). And original BSD license (http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD_4Clause) is specific to "Computer Systems Engineering group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory", which is obviously no blocker to be adopted elsewhere. I don't see why replacing the name of the project should invalidate a license. > (2) We should not use the license because it is not approved by the > Open Source Initiative. OSI approval is important for some open source > funding programmes etc. Seems to work quite successfully for eCos, ERIKA [1], GNU Guile [2], libgcc [3], NetBeans [4], ChibiOS [5] and several other bigger projects. Would be interesting what FSF says about it. At least eCos, ERIKA and ChibiOS are very similar to RIOT from a software architecture point of view (OS for embedded hardware). > If you want to spend more time on this, I recommend the thread > http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-August/000853.html, > > in particular > http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-September/000910.html. I haven't found any clear answers in these two mails and don't want to spend the rest of the evening reading through another license discussion, I have enough with this one here. From what I've read, I gather that oSI doesn't want to approve it, because there's no need to approve it: "why not simply stop referring to 'the eCos License 2.0' as though it were a special license and instead characterize eCos as being licensed as 'GPLv2 or later' with a permissive exception? I've encountered other projects using similarly-worded GPL exceptions but to my recollection those projects characterize themselves as being GPL-licensed." Long story short: I see your concerns, but for me GPL + Linking Exception is a common license model that works well for many well-known and mature projects. Personally, I would think that GPL + Linking Exception matches our needs far better than LGPL. As I see it now, we won't come to any conclusion for or against switching to a non-copyleft license that satisfies everyone, because the goals and visions where to go with RIOT are too different. Cheers, Oleg [1] http://erika.tuxfamily.org/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ [3] https://gcc.gnu.org/ [4] http://netbeans.org/ [5] http://www.chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=chibios:license -- The bad thing about IPv6 jokes is that nobody wants to tell them first.
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