[Ncl-devel] license

[Hilmar L. <hl...@ne...>]

Mark et al,

I'm very pleased to see your NCL project idea on the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code project ideas list! I think getting NeXML (and as you note other standards) capability in there would be really great.

Seeing this is also the kick I've needed to resume a discussion that I was in the process of starting here two years or so ago, and then failed to ever take anywhere. So here's my second attempt, and hopefully I'll be better this time in not just dropping the ball before it even gets going.

My understanding is that NCL is currently GPL licensed. While there were probably good reasons for doing this when it started, it also does present a barrier to NCL, and thereby capabilities conveyed through NCL, being adopted by phylogenetic analysis programs written in C/C++ that aren't open-source yet are widely used. The most prominent example that comes to mind here is of course PAUP*. As it stands now, PAUP* can't use NCL unless Dave S open-sources it, for which last time I spoke with him he had no plans of doing so.

You could of course take the position that the GPL license for NCL is specifically chosen so that projects and developers who themselves don't contribute open-source back to the community can't take advantage of it, thus ostensibly providing an incentive towards greater adoption of open-source. I'm actually not unsympathetic to such a principled stance, if indeed this is the position you and other NCL developers have had in mind with the choice of license. Though, as we probably all know, the real world is more complex; for example, Dave S AFAIK does contribute to open-source projects (such as Phycas), it's just that PAUP* is closed-source.

So I'm curious about two things. One, were the barriers to reuse in closed-source and commercial contexts intended when the GPL license was originally chosen? And two, if not, how feasible would it be to change the license of the NCL code to something more permissive, even if only LGPL?

	-hilmar 
-- 
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
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