License change for gpexecute.c and .h, BSD, LGPLv2

[<tim...@en...>]

Dear contributors to gnuplot,

The last days, I took the initiative to contact the authors of 
gpexecute.c and gpexecute.h to ask them about a change of the license of 
those files. As you know from my previous posts on this mailing list, 
dealing with gnuplot ambiguous license is part my todo list. I chose to 
start with those two files, because the authors are well identified and 
the code itself is self-contained and useful for terminal drivers as a 
communication library with gnuplot core.

So I first wrote to the original authors: Johannes Zellner, Petr 
Mikulik, Pieter-Tjerk de Boer.
Then I wrote to the contributors: Hans-Bernhard Broeker, Ethan Merritt.

I got positive answers for all of the six people, with the following 
details:

original authors:
Johannes: BSD favourite, LGPLv2 ok
Petr: BSD favourite ("as open as possible"), LGPLv2 ok
Pieter-Tjerk: LGPLv2 favourite, BSD ok

contributors to these two files:
Ethan: BSD favourite, LGPLv2 ok
Alexander: BSD or LGPL, hasn't expressed a preference yet
Hans-Bernhard: LGPLv2 favourite, BSD ok

for what is worth (I modified to lines of gpexecute.c last week ;):
me: LGPLv2 favourite, BSD ok

The good news is that we have agreement from everybody to relicense 
these two files.
The next step is to choose between the two licenses, and as you can see 
the two have roughly an equal share of votes.

So I propose to wait until next week for the final decision, and 
meanwhile I'll let any other contributor to gnuplot speak up. Of course, 
it could be great to get other files of gnuplot relicensed, and it's 
pretty essential to have the _same license for the whole project_, for 
the sake of clarity.

For those of you who are going to speak up now, here is a short reminder 
of some differences between BSD 
(http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html) and LGPL 
(http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html) :
-BSD imposes very few restrictions on the reuse of the code. It's 
roughly "do whatever you want with this", in particular you can include 
the code in proprietary applications
-LGPL additionally tries to ensure that the modified code remains free. 
It's roughly: "use, modify, or distribute it as you want, but make your 
modifications publicly available".

Thank you for your interest in the future of gnuplot, I hope to read 
from you soon.

Best regards,

Timothée Lecomte
--
École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Condensed Matter Physics graduate