On licencing

(original date 2013-8-31) A did some brainstorming in nmrshiftdb2 software licencing (the licence for the data is a different thing). Until now, the software is licenced under an "artistic licence", which you can read here. This was chosen 11 years ago when the NMRShiftDB project started because it was considered a liberal licence. Whilst there have not been real problems so far, there are at least two potential pitfalls: a) This licence is not considered a free licence by the Free Software Foundation b) Integration of GPL Software is not possible.

Therefore, I am thinking about a relicencing. I think the new licence will be the GPL, since I like the idea and I don't think that the "viral" effect is a problem here. Now the whole issue of relicencing is tricky and I can't give legal advise, but for my understanding the situation is as follows:

• I (Stefan Kuhn) can license the material I wrote under as many licences I like
• Contributions by other people cannot change their licence without consent of authors
• Old versions of the software will always be available under the conditions aka licence under which they where originally release

So if there are no other ideas nmrshiftb2 from the next release (coming soon hopefully) will be licenced under GPL. The old releases will stay as they are and material included in the new releases by third people will still retain it's original artistic licence.

EDIT: I just noticed the OSI approves the Artistic Licence 1.0 (http://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-1.0). I still like the idea of using a more popular licence.