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UpstandingHackers / hammer

Parser combinators for binary formats, in C. Yes, in C. What? Don't look at me like that.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Permissive license #44

Open davidfetter opened 10 years ago

davidfetter commented 10 years ago

Please consider one of the permissive licenses for this (2-clause BSD, MIT, WTFPL) so projects with such licenses can use the tool.

thequux commented 10 years ago

The GPL is at the moment a stopgap measure; out intent is to be freely integrable with any OSI-licensed project, while still being able to charge for use in closed-source projects.

There are still some open questions relating to BSD-style licenses and what happens when somebody releases a closed source build with modifications, and we'd want to charge for a license for that. This will probably require consulting a lawyer on our end.

What are your license requirements regarding closed-source forks?

David Fetter notifications@github.com wrote:

Please consider one of the permissive licenses for this (2-clause BSD, MIT, WTFPL) so projects with such licenses can use the tool.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

davidfetter commented 10 years ago

Not my requirements /per se/, but for example if we at the PostgreSQL project were to consider using anything Hammer for anything we can't do without (parsing SQL, e.g.), we'd need it under a license compatible with the PostgreSQL license, which you can think of as somewhere between the 2-clause BSDL and the MITL.

In the case of PostgreSQL, we have this requirement because we're intended to be infrastructure for proprietary products, of which Netezza, Greenplum, and Paraccel/Redshift are examples.

abiggerhammer commented 10 years ago

AIUI, Zed Shaw handles requests from open-source projects for more permissive licenses on his GPLed code by "selling" the requesting project a BSD license. I don't know whether any consideration actually changes hands for said license, though it would be pretty funny to sell Postgres a BSD license to Hammer for a beer or something.

Isn't this situation what the LGPL was designed for, though?

davidfetter commented 10 years ago

I'm not an attorney and don't represent the PostgreSQL project in any capacity. That said, it's already an uphill thing to get people to look at a radical change in how they do parsing without then giving them an excuse not to involving the license.

thequux commented 10 years ago

Isn't this situation what the LGPL was designed for, though?

Kind of. LGPL makes it difficult to sell your software because it can be freely linked against by proprietary works. Chances are that we'll have to talk to a lawyer to see if what I'm looking for is even possible. That said, parsing is a hard-enough sell already that we may want to consider just switching to MIT/BSD. I need to look back at the terms to see which I like better; ISTR that I have a weak preference, but I can't recall which way it goes.