License choices

[kdm9]

Hi all,

@Ward9250 and I had a chat about license choices on gitter. As we move to independent packages, maintainers may want to vary licenses from the default, very liberal MIT license. There are many alternatives, but the three that have been mentioned are:

• MIT: Simple, easy to comprehend, and very liberal.
• MPL2: a file-wise copy left license: To quote tldrlegal.com: "MPL is a copyleft license that is easy to comply with. You must make the source code for any of your changes available under MPL, but you can combine the MPL software with proprietary code, as long as you keep the MPL code in separate files."
• LGPL: Same spirit as MPL2, however not sure how different it is legally to the GPL when no linking occurs. Also contains the letters G, P and L, which may be a red flag to some lawyer somewhere :)

To quote Ben, this is motivated by the idea that

I don't think it's much for BioJulia to ask "Here's the code, use it in industry, academia, wherever, without fear of our license being viral and affecting your system - but quid pro quo, we made that component, voluntarily, for our fields, we're giving it to you for free, the least we can ask for is changes and improvements to our component back (which the MIT License cannot guarantee, the LGPL (& MPL2) can).

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, and would like to license Kmers.jl under the MPL2. What do other contributors feel?

If someone outside academia is reading this, I'd love your opinion on whether or not this change would affect you in any way (either increase the chances of contribution, or decrease the chances of you using BioJulia software). We have no intention of making this software harder for anyone to use, including commercially.

(By the way, this issue is meant to start a conversation. Nothing has been decided.)

Cheers, K

[mkborregaard]

One consideration to add to this, if LGPL is on the table, is the possibility of full GPL - the major advantage being that practically all existing Bio-software is GPL, and having GPL would make simply porting any elements of that software legal and license-compliant. This opens a huge library of potential code to copy/port.