John's answer is spot on. I recently wrote this post on hacker news summarizing my view on choosing open source licenses:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026627 > On Jan 26, 2014, at 5:36 PM, John Myles White <[email protected]> > wrote: > > 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 >
