Disclaimer: I appreciate that no one here is an IP lawyer and that any discussion doesn't count as legal advice.
Just so I'm clear, as I understand it, if execnet were GPL then: 1: It would still be free (beer) for us to use and abuse any way we choose internally as long as we aren't distributing anything related to it. 2: Any modifications we made to it and distributed would be subject to GPL or the alternate license. 3: Any code derived from it that we distributed would be subject to GPL or the alternate license. 4: Any code that imports it that we distribute would be subject to GPL or the alternate license. 5: Alternatively the LGPL picture would be the same except 4 wouldn't apply. Please correct me if any of that is wrong. Assuming it is all correct then I have no problems with 1-3. Point 4 could be interesting, now the obvious scenario here would seem to be that we write some tool that uses execnet and wish to sell it and or make it publicly available. That scenario I have no problem with it is part and parcel of building things out of open source components. Indeed in that vein we have an internal tool that uses execnet that we are looking at distributing as open source. As you said "execnet presents a unique and valuable approach to glueing Python interpreters and doing rapid deployment". And the system we have built around it pushes that approach further and we would like to share that. But there is a more subtle example that concerns me, we are an embedded hardware company and use python (and more recently py lib) in our toolchain. Now imagine for the sake of discussion that we wanted to share some of that infrastructure with one of our B2B clients. Maybe we want to give them a drop of our testing infrastructure so they can use it to test products that contain our chips. I'm not sure if there is anything in the test infrastructure we would consider proprietary in that manner, but there definitely is in other areas of our infrastructure and py lib is becoming ever more popular internally. Under LGPL distributing this code in that manner would seem to be fine as we aren't distributing py lib or anything derived from it. What would be the implications of GPL licensing? and how do you see this scenario sitting with whatever alternate license you are considering? Gordon. On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 5:36 PM, holger krekel <hol...@merlinux.eu> wrote: > Hi all, > > some of you know that i am considering licensing and general > funding issues recently, see here for the current licensing status: > > http://codespeak.net/py/trunk/faq.html#whygpl > > However, i am considering releasing the execnet code under the > GPL and the the rest under the LGPL. This would mean that execnet > can be used in free software but not in proprietary software > without getting a different license. > > I think execnet presents a unique and valuable approach to glueing > Python interpreters and doing rapid deployment. It can particularly > help with managing clouds of computers and I'd like to put more efforts > into improving and extending in this area. And i'd like to tap into > getting dual-licensing revenue. Which, on a side note, would flow back > to me and e.g. http://merlinux.eu/people.html so we all can continue to work > on great things. > > I am open to comments, arguments or bribes in the form > of contracts for improvements :) > > cheers, > > holger > > Maybe also of interest to you (currently unreachable for me, though) > http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html > > -- > Metaprogramming, Python, Testing: http://tetamap.wordpress.com > Python, PyPy, pytest contracting: http://merlinux.eu > _______________________________________________ > py-dev mailing list > py-dev@codespeak.net > http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/py-dev > _______________________________________________ py-dev mailing list py-dev@codespeak.net http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/py-dev
