Thanks for the pointer to the discussion on Hacker News. I have to admit I prefer GPL over BSD or MIT. But I can live with an MIT license if necessary.
I always thought it necessary to add a version of the original GPL license -- or at least a link to it -- to software distributed under GPL. In the Julia distribution I did not find such a link. Did I overlook, or shouldn't it be added? On Monday, January 27, 2014 1:33:28 AM UTC+1, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > 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]<javascript:>> > 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 > >
