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#198 relicense (part of) as MIT

open
nobody
None
5
2016-03-30
2016-03-21
Egon Willighagen
No

From Twitter:

CDK is an awesome toolkit but unfortunately LGPL and Apache (used in Chem4Word) don't play nicely together. :-(

See https://twitter.com/deadlyvices/status/711899335584325632

Discussion

  • John May

    John May - 2016-03-21

    Hmm only one way right? If Chem4Word were LGPL all would be fine :-)

     

    • Egon Willighagen

      Egon Willighagen - 2016-03-21

      Actually, I also guess LGPL 3 should be fine with the Apache license... that was one of the things they changed with (L)GPL 3...

      But, this issue is also a bit in reply to discussions in the past... where the consensus was, if it would help people to move to a more liberal license, yes, let's do it...

       

  • Till Schäfer

    Till Schäfer - 2016-03-30

    I do not realy get the point. LGPL already allows linking in the CDK. So why does this hinder Chem4Word to use CDK? If they want to add code to the CDK, they can also do it in a LGPL licenced CDK branch or submit the changes upstream.

    I guess the only inconvenience for them is that they must provide a seperate cdk.jar file and canot extract the cdk into their own jars. Please correct me, if I am wrong and there are other problems with combining the apache and LGPL.

    With the relicencing of the CDK as MIT, you wouild allow others to change/enhance the CDK and re-distribute it as a commercial proprietary software, which seems not so unlikely in the cheminformatics field.

    Furhtermore, you will need to ask every commiter of the CDK to aknowledge the licence change or replace the code with your own. This seems to be an extensive undertaking.

     

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