On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 6:38 AM, Roy Stogner <royst...@ices.utexas.edu>wrote:
> I don't share Derek's newfound anger at the GPL.
>
It's not newfound! We've been going through the bureaucracy here to try to
open source MOOSE and a big part of that has been to try to understand all
of our open-source licensing options and the potential implications. This
is why I was arguing with Roy in the first place (because I thought I had
just figured this out a few weeks ago)... and I'm glad I did because I was
wrong!
Open-source licensing is a straight up fiasco. Between license
incompatibility and patent issues it's just a damn mess! That doesn't mean
it's not worth the pain... and _we_ all understand that the intent is good
behind each open-source license... but the actual legal ramifications of
each individual word in those licenses is a pain in the ass once you get
the the lawyers involved (they are deeply involved in my case).
> If people want to
> get paid for their software that's fine, and if their preferred form
> of pay is "you can't link with it without open sourcing some of your
> stuff" rather than "you can't run it without giving me some of your
> money" that's fine too. But I don't want either policy for libMesh.
Agreed.
> Agreed. Time to replace or marginalize libHilbert, then. What was
> the advantage of that over the sfcurves code?
Definitely - it scares me that we have GPL code in contrib at this point.
We've been operating in the mode of believing that everything in libMesh
was either LGPL or looser...
Then we got lucky. We've had too many contributors of major chunks of
> code at this point; if we ever did want to change the license to
> something non-LGPL-upgradeable, it'd probably be easier to start
> rewrite from scratch than to hunt down everybody who sent in
> large-enough-to-copyright patches under the understanding that they
> were going to be LGPLed.
>
INL wouldn't (couldn't) play a role in a purely GPL codebase. Our
government contract says that whatever we make has to be useable by the
government for whatever purposes it wants... and that includes creating
closed source software (and licensing that to companies). I don't know
that we could legally contribute to a GPL library...
Beyond that - I agree with Ben that I don't think that a more restrictive
license servers the purpose of libMesh. Personally, I don't care of my
contributions to libMesh are used for a commercial application... and I
think that the freedom people have with libMesh is one reason people choose
libMesh...
Derek
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