LICENSE

[StevenClontz]

Right now we're using an MIT license. (A mostly arbitrary choice I made during some initial work that I failed to revisit.) I understand this is compatible with GPL (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902754/mit-vs-gpl-license), but it's worth discussing if we want to keep MIT or switch to GPL.

In fact according to that link we automatically made our project GPL by distributing part of rbeezer/mathbook, since it is GPL itself. Future distributions are okay being MIT if we implement #21.

I'd like @rbeezer's input on the choice of GPL vs others including MIT.

[rbeezer]

If I was writing a library really only meant for inclusion in a bigger piece of software, I might use a permissive license. But I think of PreTeXt more as an "end-user" piece of software. So I'm kinda attached to a viral license.

If PTX was "pip installable" would it not matter if the licenses were different?

I'm open to your views on this, so don't think this has to be the last word.

Rob

[StevenClontz]

The licenses could be different if we want, as long as the GPL PreTeXt core is not distributed with the MIT PreTeXt CLI, which would be achieved seamlessly if the CLI's PyPI package requires the core's PyPI package. (Now that we have the pretextbook namespace, I'd recommend pretextbook.core as the name for such a project.)

If I understand correctly: Since MIT code can be used in a GPL project, it's always possible to switch that direction later for this CLI. But given the dozens of contributors to PreTeXt's core, there's no feasible way to ever switch the core back to the less restrictive MIT (you'd have to get the assent of all contributors).

So we have time to consider, but it's certainly best to stick to MIT until a point where we're sure GPL is better.

[StevenClontz]

need to update setup.py

[StevenClontz]

Since I didn't mention it here, we decided to relicense to GPL to match core PreTeXt.