[Pkg-exppsy-maintainers] Licensing

[Per B. Sederberg]

Hi PyMVPAers:

I was gonna just sit on the sideline for this one, especially because
I was leaning towards the whole BSD-compatible license scheme anyway,
but after reading Christoph's original email, the scipy page
(including John Hunter's long email), and now Christoph's second email
I actually have an opinion :)

So, I spent 4 years in a small software development company, writing
proprietary code.  We wrote custom software for businesses and the
entire business model revolved around us hiding our code from everyone
and making sure we held on tight to it.  I'm not proud of those days
and I look back on them with a bit of disdain (mainly because it was
almost completely in windows and, the one time we did unix work we
actually used SCO).

Almost every bit of software I use now is open source (especially now
that I dropped that OSX like it was hot and am finally back in
Debian-land) and most of it, except for numpy and scipy, is GPL'd.
I'm actually pretty proud of that and I think the world is a better
place because of the GPL.

I can (sort of) understand why the numpy/scipy folks are using a
BSD-compatible license, but the real reason probably has to do with
the fact that there's a ton of money going into it from that enthought
company, which probably wouldn't be putting money and resources into
it otherwise.

The way I see it, if R, the linux kernel, and emacs can be GPL'd, then
pymvpa and pyeeg sure can be.  If some company wants to use it, then
why not LGPL it, like pyepl.

You hold the copyright, so the decision is yours to make at any time.
Why not release it under GPL or LGPL for now and then switch to
BSD-like when and if there is ever the chance for it to be integrated
into numpy / scipy / nipy, which I'm not sure it ever should be.

So, it looks like I'm siding with the idealistic views that Christoph
put forward :)

I'm still quite interested in hearing what ya'll have to say...

Best,
Per


On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 9:20 PM, Christoph T. Weidemann <ctw at cogsci.info> wrote:
> 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
>
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