I want to ask opinions about two licensing changes I am thinking of 1.) Switching Libmarpa to the MIT/Lua license. Currently there are some companies that forbid their employees to read LGPL code, because of the danger to their IP in the code that those employees write. In the case of Libmarpa, I *want* people to read my code -- they can read my papers, and the code supplements and illustrates those papers, so it makes little sense to restrict it. Moving to an MIT license means that people will be able to use the Libmarpa code freely in proprietary code. There is a downside to this, but the Lua folks and increasingly the open source community seem to be embracing this trade-off as a win.
2.) Changing both Marpa::R2 and Libmarpa so that anyone contributing code assigns the copyright to me. The upside of this is that I can change the license. That's also the downside -- I, or someone who managed to legally take over the copyright from me, would have the right to change to a proprietary license. I don't want to minimize this danger -- open source software being taken proprietary is something that happens a lot. I think the trade-offs are in favor of copyright assignment to me. My plan is to use the right to change the license to make licensing more liberal. And note that current and past versions would remain subject to the old open-source licenses -- neither I or anyone else has the right to rescind those licenses. You could always "re-free" the software by starting over from a fork of a previous open-source version. It's a hassle, but it can be done if needed. And in a sense, it's a danger you are already running -- even if I can't change the licensing, I might become a flaky project leader, with the same practical effect. I'm keeping Marpa::R2 on the LGPL, at least for the time being. With Libmarpa the asymmetry between by completely-open Theory papers and my LGPL'd code makes the trade-off pretty clear. And nobody but me has made any significant contribution to Libmarpa. With Marpa::R2, both these factors are less clear. And in some months I expect it to be replaced with a Kollos-based Marpa::R3, so that it's not worthwhile to spend a lot of time rethinking Marpa::R2 licensing. A final note: Libmarpa contains some code derived from LGPL'd code written by others -- GNU's obstack's, and Ben Pfaff's AVL code. This code must and will remain LGPL'd. Thanks, jeffrey -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "marpa parser" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
