Consider changing to more permissive license

Question

Consider changing to more permissive license

sliptonic opened this issue 6 years ago · comments

The GPL3 license with strong copyleft provisions is too restrictive to allow linking and packaging with applications like FreeCAD that are LGPL.

If openvoronoi was re-licensed LGPL2.1, inclusion in other applications would be easier and interest in using the library would increase.

I'm willing to help with any re-licensing effort and FreeCAD community will help with debian packaging if re-licensed so we can use it.

Rogach commented 6 years ago

OK

Anders Wallin · Answer 1 · Wed Jul 18 2018 15:13:18 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

To me a change to LGPL2.1 is OK.

This page lists 5 more (minor) contributors to the codebase - maybe we could get an "ok" from them in this thread just to be on the safe side before a license change.
https://github.com/aewallin/openvoronoi/graphs/contributors

in addition there are probably many forks with enhancements that haven't been merged back to my repo - but I haven't heard of any major developments...

Manuel Massing · Answer 2 · Wed Jul 18 2018 15:24:12 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I think relicensing to a more permissive license is a great idea. You've got my ok to re-license my OpenVoronoi contributions to LGPL. I wouldn't mind something even more permissive, e.g. MPL or wxWidgets (wxWidgets library license, https://www.wxwidgets.org/about/licence/), which in essence is LGPL + permission for static linking. But that's Anders call of course :-)

Nicolas Raynaud · Answer 3 · Wed Jul 18 2018 23:24:00 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm perfectly ok with re-licensing my code the way you want.

G.A. vd. Hoorn · Answer 4 · Wed Jul 18 2018 23:39:53 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm ok with re-licensing to lgpl or a more permissive license.

Victor Lamoine · Answer 5 · Thu Jul 19 2018 01:44:41 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm ok with re-licensing to lgpl or a more permissive license.

Blokkendoos · Answer 6 · Thu Jul 19 2018 03:55:41 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm ok with LGPL or a more permissive license.
@jtpederson Are you ok too?

Anders Wallin · Answer 7 · Thu Jul 19 2018 14:53:30 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thanks for quick replies everyone!

What would be the preferred workflow for this? I could imagine:

tag the current version "GPL2018.07" as the last with the old license
do the license change in all files where GPL is mentioned (maybe some automation here?)
tag a new version as 2018.08 (or similar) using LGPL

sliptonic · Answer 8 · Fri Jul 20 2018 03:07:31 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

That sounds good to me. The license header change is probably a solved problem. Maybe here: https://github.com/johann-petrak/licenseheaders

Anders Wallin · Answer 9 · Wed Jul 25 2018 21:02:48 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

The proposed change to LGPL 2.1 is now in a branch called "LGPL".
I will try to go through most non-trivial c++/python files and check the headers in the next few days.
If there are no objections I will then merge LGPL into master.

Anders Wallin · Answer 10 · Tue Jul 31 2018 16:27:43 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I merged the LGPL branch into master. (pull request #40 )
Thanks for the help with changing the license.
closing this issue now.

Kurt Kremitzki · Answer 11 · Tue Jul 31 2018 23:36:17 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@aewallin Can you tag a release with a bumped version number, preferably one that is greater than current existing tags? (i.e. since there's a tag that starts with version "2018...", tagging 18.07 or 18.08 would not be ideal since version comparison tools would think version 18.x < version 2018.x)

Anders Wallin · Answer 12 · Wed Aug 01 2018 20:18:09 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

2018.08 now tagged, from master.