Re: [Openeeg-list] Considerations

[Jim P. <ji...@ua...>]

Dave Fisher wrote:
> I was looking at the MPL 1.1 license earlier and saw that they had a similar
> clause except that it is a "tri-license" (for MPL/GPL/LGPL) which states:
> 
>  * Alternatively, the contents of this file may be used under the terms of
>  * either the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later (the "GPL"), or
>  * the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1 or later (the "LGPL"),
>  * in which case the provisions of the GPL or the LGPL are applicable instead
>  * of those above. If you wish to allow use of your version of this file only

Well, if you are giving people the option of both the GPL and LGPL,
you might as well just say "LGPL", because that is simply a less
restrictive version of the GPL.  (We don't have the tens of thousands
of source files that the Mozilla project has to worry about, which is
one of the reasons they give for preferring to specify both).

I was just looking on the SourceForge site, and I noticed that someone
has put the MPL up as the licence for the whole project.  "Oh no!!", I
thought.  This is the worst possible idea.  If you say "Mozilla Public
Licence" to many open-source people they immediately think
"ill-conceived/broken/problematic licencing strategy, non-GPL
compatible, etc, etc".

If we are going to dual/triple licence things, can we make sure that
all the possible licences are listed on the SourceForge site, or
otherwise we might end up putting off potential developers.

My own feeling is to respect people's choice of licences, so long as
it doesn't cause major problems.  However, for myself I would use GNU
licences, and then review the situation later if someone found a
commercial application for the code that clashed with that.  It is
possible to relicence the code later so long as all the authors can be
contacted.

People have used the GPL before for the very reason that it *is*
incompatible with closed-source business use.  For example, FFTW
(www.fftw.org, a very fast FFT engine, used in BWView) was only
released under the GPL because this would not upset the existing
revenue stream for business FFTW licences for MIT (who own the FFTW
copyright).  So FFTW is free for GPL apps (and any other open-source
software with a GPL-compatible licence), but non-free code has to pay
to use it.

(Incidentally this licencing of FFTW will in fact immediately disable
the MPL option of any triple-licenced code in our project if we choose
to link with FFTW, as the MPL is not GPL-compatible).

Taking a strong GPL-only approach, as in FFTW, if some business wants
to use the openEEG code without releasing their own source code, we
could allow them to do so in exchange for some kind of sponsorship or
support for the project.  That is one of the things the GPL (and
perhaps LGPL in a few cases) would give us.  (They would have to pay
to licence FFTW in any case, if we used that library.)

Well, that is an option at least.  I'm not actually suggesting we
should take such a strong GPL-only 'free software' stance, especially
if people are uncomfortable with that -- I'm just pointing out the
range of possibilities and choices.

I think a combination of GPL and LGPL has worked well enough for many
projects in the past.  If people really want to be more permissive in
their licencing terms in advance, perhaps it would be better to choose
one of the more relaxed GPL-compatible licences (rather than using the
incompatible MPL).  I have a lot of respect for Larry Wall -- so I was
happier when we were discussing using one of the more recent Artistic
licences (i.e. a GPL-compatible one).


Anyway, for now the most important thing for me is to make sure the
MPL isn't listed as the *only* licence for the project.

I hope I'm making sense ...

Jim

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