[Pkg-exppsy-maintainers] Licensing

[Christoph T. Weidemann]

Hi Michael!

Thanks for the info! I was not aware of the scipy license
compatibility page. I was a bit surprised by their reasoning and
especially by the fact that they won't even consider LGPL. I would
definitely be interested to hear what the NIPY people think of this
when you bring it up at the code sprint.

In any case, here's my take on it:

There doesn't seem to be a great chance that pymvpa will be part of
scipy or NIPY anytime soon, and especially in the later case I'm not
even sure if it should be (the pattern analyses should be general
enough to be useful for all kinds of data, not just those from
neuroimaging). Likewise, as far as I know there's no company who's
currently interested in helping to improve pymvpa and who wouldn't do
it if we switched to GPL. (The situation might be different for
pynifty.)

So it seems to me that this compliance with their licensing policy,
which (it seems) neither of us is particularly happy with, is
premature at best. If there is serious interest in having pymvpa
become part of one of these packages in the future, or if a company
wants to help out, but doesn't want to be bound by the GPL we could
always reconsider then (or ask them to reconsider). In short, at the
present point I don't think we should cast away the GPL, just because
some other popular packages do.

Also, I found the following note at
http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki/ReadMe :
"This NIPY distribution contains no GNU General Public Licensed
(GPLed) code so it may be used in proprietary projects. There are
interfaces to some GNU code but these are entirely optional."
So, if integration with NIPY is a goal, why not have that achieved
with an interface to the GPLed code. Those who don't want to be bound
by the GPL can't use pymvpa, those who want to use it, have to share
alike.

Anyway, just my 2 cents ... let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Christoph