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Dirkster99 / AvalonDock

Our own development branch of the well known WPF document docking library
Microsoft Public License
1.41k stars 321 forks source link

About MS-PL licensing and compatibility #398

Closed retailcoder closed 1 year ago

retailcoder commented 1 year ago

Hi,

I own and maintain Rubberduck, an open-source VBIDE add-in that's under a GPLv3 license, and we're planning to build Rubberduck 3.0 essentially from the ground up with an AvalonEdit editor (licensed under MIT), ...in a dream world that would be hosted inside an AvalonDock component (note, I'm not even sure it can work at this stage; my early attempts are blowing up with a NRE when I drag a docked panel.. we're hosting the XAML inside a WinForms UserControl, that itself is hosted inside a VBIDE toolwindow), but then that's licensed under MS-PL and it appears the license isn't compatible with GPLv3.

The last thing I want is to put Rubberduck, myself, or any of my fellow contributors in trouble over licensing issues, so I'm wondering out loud here - assuming we can make it work in our rather special scenario, is there any chance the copyright holder(s) would agree to allow our Rubberduck3 project to use AvalonDock despite the apparent licensing incompatibility? I realize getting such a derogation might be a stretch, but figured it costs nothing to ask.

Thank you for your time!

eriove commented 1 year ago

I believe there are many different copyright holders and that the original authors are no longer involved, so most likely changing the license would be very hard to achieve.