On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, John Owens apparently wrote: > Over in pyx-user we've been discussing adding "ColorBrewer" color > schemes (www.colorbrewer.org). Here's the license (below). It's > "Apache-like". If we were to use them, it's clearly "source form" > redistribution. I don't think adding the > copyright/conditions/disclaimer is a problem, or the acknowledgement, > or putting the appropriate text in the manual. The only > thing I don't know about is the compatibility of this > license with the GPL.
You need to be much clearer about what you mean by GPL "compatability". Apache uses a liberal license. There is no problem adding this code to a GPL'd project, subject to the citation conditions. In contrast, there is a problem adding GPL'd code to a project with a liberal license. In addition, code within a project may have different licenses, as long as the GPL restrictions on dependencies are correctly observed. I would hope that, in respect of the original license, an effort would be made to write the color-brewer based code so that it can be seen as satisfying these restrictions, so that it can continue under a liberal license. (Very roughly, this means that the code must function usefully in the absence of PyX.) In addition, I hope that these kind of issues stimulate the PyX developers to reconsider whether the GPL is the best license for PyX. A single anecdote does not a case made, of course, but in fact this is not the first time (nor the most serious time) that licensing issues have arisen. It is natural that those who write the code get to choose the license, and those who don't (like me) should generally shut up. I am a grateful user of this excellent package, and I wish it continued success: for this reason I occasionally share my contrary views on how best to maintain that success in the long run. Cheers, Alan Isaac _______________________________________________ PyX-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pyx-devel
