[jgrapht-users] Licensing: Dual license JGraphT under EPL and LGPL

[Oliver K. <ko...@gm...>]

Dear JGraphT users and developers,

Currently, the JGraphT project is released under the LGPL. The Eclipse
Software Foundation, however, decided to disallow LGPL libraries in their
projects (http://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/lgpl-pain/). A similar
issue applies for projects under the umbrella of the Apache Software
Foundation (http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html).

As a reciprocal license, LGPL requires anyone redistributing JGraphT to
publish any source code changes they make. As the Eclipse Public License
(EPL) also requires this, and is compatible with the regulations of the
Apache Software Foundation ("Category B: Reciprocal Licenses" in
http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html), it seems like a good choice for
resolving the incompatibilities. Hence we've started this initiative to
dual license JGraphT under LGPL and EPL. This has been successfully done
for the Logback project (http://logback.qos.ch/license.html) and the
qooxdoo project (http://qooxdoo.org/license).

It is not proposed to relicense JGraphT under BSD, MIT, or Apache 2.0
license as it is acknowledged that the original authors may want
modifications of their code being published, and these kind of licenses do
not enforce that.

All in all, we propose to relicense JGraphT under the following terms:

--cut--
JGraphT Licensing Information
=============================

JGraphT may be used under the terms of either the

  * GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1
    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html

or the

  * Eclipse Public License (EPL)
    http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-v10.php

As a recipient of JGraphT, you may choose which license to receive the code
under.
--end--

This also includes future commits. Contributions will only be accepted with
the understanding that the contributor's code will be released under both
licenses and that a user may freely choose between one of the licenses.

Contributions to JGraphT have up to this point been LGPL-only, with no
Copyright License Assignment (CLA) required from contributors. As such,
relicensing requires seeking the consent of all contributors (or possibly
removing contributions for which such consent has been withheld). We will
make a best effort to contact all past contributors and request their
consent. JGraphT has a long history (going back ten years to 2003),
including many small contributions from one-time contributors. If we don't
hear back from someone within a few months, we'll assume Qui tacet
consentiret. Until copyright expiration, this may leave a very small amount
of unavoidable legal risk for those who choose to rely on the EPL licensing
option. There is no risk for those who continue to use JGraphT under the
LGPL option.

We collected all contributors from the git authors, from the authors and
contributors listed in each java file, and from CONTRIBUTORS.md. These are
65 persons. We will try to find out the contact data of everyone and ask
them if they agree to additionally license their work under EPL.

Looking forward to hearing your opinion.

Greetings,

Oliver and John