Hello EasyBuilders, To make sure that everybody is up to speed on some non-technical but nevertheless important aspects of EasyBuild, we want to mention the license and policy w.r.t. contributing to EasyBuild that we formalized.
The issue in which the current licensing model (GPLv2) for EasyBuild was put to question [1] has been closed -- we decided to stick with GPLv2 for the time being. In our view, EasyBuild is doing great as GPLv2-licensed software, with several active contributors outside of the HPC-UGent team, including a large company (NVIDIA). If deemed necessary, we will reconsider a non-GPLv2 licensing option in the future (see also below). The policy w.r.t. contributing to the EasyBuild project was formalized. Note that no real changes were made: contributions from people outside the HPC-UGent team were already accepted under the same conditions, but the policy was not clarified anywhere. This is fixed now, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file in each of the EasyBuild repositories [2][3]. To summarize, currently contributions can be either (a) licensed under the MIT or BSD licenses, or (b) licensed under a GPLv2-compatible license if the author agrees with the contributor agreement that basically gives us a license to relicense the contributions under any open source license. In both cases, the contributor can retain copyright on his work. With this, we have the freedom to easily relicense the EasyBuild codebase under a less restrictive open source license if ever deemed necessary (see [4] as to why this is important). We hope this is clear to everyone, and that we can continue with focusing on the cool stuff. ;-) regards, Kenneth [1] https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/335 [2] https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md [3] https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyblocks/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md [4] http://lwn.net/Articles/525718/
