On Wed, 26 Feb 2014, Derek Gaston wrote: > How in the hell did we end up with GPL software in libmesh/contrib? > > libHilbert is GPL (says so right in the COPYING file we have for it in > contrib). > > Linking libMesh to that software in any way is a violation of that license.
No, it's not. You can link LGPL and GPL software together, you just have to license the result as GPL, and you basically can't license the derived work (in this case, "any libMesh library binary built with the default --enable-libhilbert" or "any binary statically linked to such a build") as anything else. But this doesn't preclude also licensing non-derived works (e.g. "the rest of libMesh's source code", "libMesh builds with --disable-libHilbert", and probably even "dynamically-linked apps" thanks to the fact that libHilbert doesn't make it into user code or our ABIs) under other licences like LGPL. > We should remove libHilbert from libMesh immediately! Okay, your previous sentence might be wrong, but IMHO this one isn't. The libHilbert license basically prevents anyone from distributing a libMesh app plus all dependencies as binaries unless they compiled libMesh with --disable-libHilbert or they license the whole binary under the GPL! I don't think anyone's actually passing around binaries (we add new features and change the ABI often enough that you really want to distribute libMesh apps as source code), but the whole point of us choosing LGPL is that we want to allow people to do this. > How much do we rely on it? Narrowly but heavily: IIRC libHilbert is basically the only thing we've got that makes N-to-M restarts possible, which is a very nice feature to have. --- Roy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Flow-based real-time traffic analytics software. Cisco certified tool. Monitor traffic, SLAs, QoS, Medianet, WAAS etc. with NetFlow Analyzer Customize your own dashboards, set traffic alerts and generate reports. Network behavioral analysis & security monitoring. All-in-one tool. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=126839071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Libmesh-devel mailing list Libmesh-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/libmesh-devel
