Hello, and thanks for your contribution to OpenBabel and to free software in
general.
On Jul 1, 2010, at 3:12 AM, Hans De Winter wrote:
> We plan to do this by including a modified header in the .h and .cpp files of
> the Spectrophore code. A proposal for this is given here:
...
> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
> it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
> the Free Software Foundation version 2 of the License.
If the software is based on work done by Silicos and is not directly
derived from OpenBabel then I urge you to use the following phrase from
the GPLv2:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
OpenBabel is based on OpenEye's OELib, and OpenEye specified version 2 only,
without the option to use later versions of the GPL.
When OpenEye released under that license, it wasn't a problem as there was
no later license. But GPLv3 was released several years ago, and I expect
problems in the future as more and more people start using the v3 license
over the v2.
It expect it will take about a decade to be a serious problem, but there's
no reason that new contributions can't using a "or any later version",
which would help reduce the severity of future problems.
It also means that someone could take your contribution and make it work
with, under Indigo, which is a relatively recent cheminformatics code
released under GPLv3.
Best regards,
Andrew Dalke
da...@dalkescientific.com
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