[Pkg-exppsy-maintainers] Licensing

[Per B. Sederberg]

So, to reveal a bit of my ignorance on the subject, what happens as we
provide a wrapper to the shogun-toolbox, which is GPL3?  Is that a
problem given that we do not release under GPL?  I realize we are not
distributing that code, but if we call that code at all, even as a
library, doesn't our code also have to be GPL'd?

Thanks,
Per


On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Michael Hanke <michael.hanke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 09:20:59PM -0500, Christoph T. Weidemann 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.
>  As I said, I did not do it for any single 'money'-reason given on the SciPy
>  licensing page. I do not agree with any of the
>  we-need-to-attract-companies-points given there.
>  Furthermore I do not expect that any company would take pymvpa for
>  anything or even contribute to it ;-)
>
>  I do not even speculate about having code merged into NiPy and/or SciPy.
>  The _only_ argument which is valid for me (and my only reason) is that
>  that having very special interest projects like pymvpa and using some
>  license for one project and some other for another, slows down the overall
>  development process. You can easily get into licensing problems when you
>  want to merge code licensed under something else. Having related
>  projects (wrt language, field, ...) share a single license makes life
>  easier. This is maybe also the reason why Perl licensing statements
>  mostly look like: 'Same as Perl itself.'
>
>  SciPy/NumPy simply is _the_ big player in the field - using its license
>  seem reasonable to me. And in the end it is all free software
>  (simplified view of the reality -- I know ;-).
>
>
>
>  Cheers,
>
>  Michael
>
>  --
>  GPG key:  1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
>  http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke
>  ICQ: 48230050
>
>
>
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