[cclib-devel] LGPL

[Noel O'B. <no...@ca...>]

Hello Adam,

I'm back from holidays. And I've fixed that final (for now) bug with the
gaussian parser.

Regarding the licensing; if we include GPL code in cclib, then cclib
needs to become GPL (the opposite isn't true though; they can include
cclib code in their GPL code so long as our license is GPL-compatible,
which most licenses are).

This is the relevant quote from Wikipedia:
"""
Many of the most common free software licenses, such as the original
MIT/X license, the BSD license (in its current 3-clause form), and the
LGPL, are "GPL-compatible". That is, their code can be combined with a
GPLed program without conflict (the new combination would have the GPL
applied to the whole).
"""

To be honest, I'm still leaning towards the Python license, which is
what most Python software has anyway. This means we don't have to worry
about any of this stuff, so long as we don't want to include any
GPL-code in it. PyQuante uses a similar license, as does BioPython. If
you still say LGPL (to ensure pymol has no problems) then we'll do that.
It's just that I'm about to modify all of the license pages now, and
want to sort this out before I start doing this.

Regards,
  Noel