Hi Hans, (1) The GPL makes it impossible for users of Julia to embed Julia as part of a closed source product. We’d prefer not to impose that restriction. The BSD and MIT licenses are largely identical: the major difference is that the BSD license comes in several flavors, not all of which are equivalent to the MIT license. The BSD license with two clauses is effectively the same license as the MIT license.
(2) All of the code written for Julia by Julia developers is licensed under the MIT license. Only some dependencies like FFTW are licensed under the GPL, but those dependencies are sufficient to make the aggregate of Julia + dependencies fall under the GPL. (3) Either the removal or the recreation of the GPL components of the current Julia distribution would be sufficient to remove the GPL restriction on the Julia distribution. Some parts, like Rmath, are easily replaceable. Other parts, like SuiteSparse, are much harder to replace and would likely have to be removed to provide a non-GPL release. I hope that helps. — John On Jan 26, 2014, at 2:18 PM, Hans W Borchers <[email protected]> wrote: > In the file DISTRIBUTING.md I read the following lines: > > Note that while the code for Julia is > [MIT-licensed](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md), > the distribution created by the techniques described herein will be > GPL licensed, as various dependent libraries such as `FFTW`, `Rmath`, > `SuiteSparse`, and `git` are GPL licensed. We do hope to have a > non-GPL distribution of Julia in the future. > > For me this triggers the question: > > (1) Why is the MIT license so much better for Julia than any GPL license? > What is the main difference to consider? I think, Python is under BSD > license, would that be an alternative? > > (2) What does it mean that Julia (which part?) is under MIT license while the > distribution is GPL-licensed. Are there legal consequences for this kind > of construction? > > (3) To have a non-GPLed version in the future: Does that mean, certain parts > have to be removed, or will they have to be rewritten in C and Julia? > > Hans Werner >
