Re: [Ncl-devel] license

[Brian O'M. <bo...@ut...>]

I'm fine with any of the licensing schemes, plus I like the idea of
weighting votes by amount of contribution (in which case, my opinion counts
for little). I like the idea of compelling open source use in general, but
phylogenetics is so small and yet needs so much work that allowing as much
reuse as possible makes sense to me.

Brian



_______________________________________
Brian O'Meara
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
U. of Tennessee, Knoxville
http://www.brianomeara.info

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On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Mark Holder <mth...@ku...> wrote:

> Hi Hilmar et al.,
>
> *** Paul, Derrick, Brian, Brandon, François, Jeet, David, and Mick: please
> see below and respond!
>
>
>    Paul Lewis is the original author of NCL, so the licencse was his
> decision.
>
> Why don't we see if we can get the authors to agree to a more permissive
> license?
>
>
>
> If you are a contributor to NCL, please respond to me (or the list) to
> indicate
> whether your fine with dual licensing NCL under GPL and any one of these
> three open source licenses:
>
>    LGPL http://www.opensource.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0
>
>    Simplified BSD http://www.opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause
>
>    MIT http://www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT
>
> I'm fine with any of them. Other suggestions are welcome.
>
> The contributors to the main branch of NCL (v2.1) are:
>    Me
>    Paul O. Lewis
>    Derrick Zwickl
>    Brian O'Meara
>    Brandon Chisham
>    François Michonneau
>    Jeet Sukumaran
>
> David Suárez Pascal contributed SWIG bindings which heavily influenced
> those
>    found in branches/v2.2 (that was part of the 2007 GSoC, and I updated
> his work
>    to deal with updates to NCL's API).  So he is an author of v2.2 branch.
>
> Mick Elliot contributed some code to the xml branch under the 2010 GSoC.
>
> I've bcc'd all of the contributors.
>
> I suppose that if we do not reach a consensus about another license, but
> Paul
> agrees to a more permissive license, then I can look into producing a
> version
> of the code that just uses contributions from those authors who give their
> consent. I would estimate that >98% of the code is from Paul or I.
>
> all the best,
> Mark
>
>
>
> On Mar 8, 2012, at 2:33 PM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:
>
> > 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
> > --
> > ===========================================================
> > : Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
> > ===========================================================
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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>
> Mark Holder
>
> mth...@ku...
> http://phylo.bio.ku.edu/mark-holder
>
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