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WebDrake / Dgraph

Graph library written in D.
GNU General Public License v3.0
45 stars 6 forks source link

Change license to the Boost to allow commercial usage #6

Closed ilya-stromberg closed 11 years ago

ilya-stromberg commented 11 years ago

Please change license from GPLv3 to something more liberal like Boost, MIT or BSD to allow commercial usage.

Also, it would be nice to have graph library in Phobos in a future, and in that case module must be under Boost license. In that case somebody can use Dgraph as initial point.

You can contact igraph authors or use Boost Graph Library (BGL) as a initial point.

See also this topic: http://forum.dlang.org/thread/efglxfvwwrpteujnaehw@forum.dlang.org

WebDrake commented 11 years ago

As we already discussed in the D forum thread you reference, while Dgraph's code is almost entirely original, there is enough direct influence from igraph that I'm not comfortable assuming that it is not technically a derivative work. As igraph is licensed under GPL, the safest thing to do is to license Dgraph similarly.

Technically I could probably license Dgraph under Boost, MIT or BSD as these are all GPL-compatible licenses, but that would be making a false promise: it would imply to downstream users that they can use the library in permissive situations, when in fact the developers of igraph might have grounds for a GPL violation claim against Dgraph derivatives.

If anyone has a specific request to use Dgraph in a proprietary application, they should approach me directly and I will look into what can be done. I may also revisit the licensing situation in future when the library as a whole is more fully developed, with the concern here being less about commercial software than ensuring that Dgraph can be used by other free software applications, whatever their licence.

However, unless there's a specific request, then for the time being I consider this matter closed for discussion. I'm aware of it and it will be revisited when the time is right.

ilya-stromberg commented 11 years ago

I thought that you will contact to the igraph authors and tell if it possible to change license. Sorry for misunderstand.

WebDrake commented 11 years ago

Sorry if I gave the wrong impression, Ilya. In fact I will contact them about this in future, but it's not in any way a short term priority.

mleise commented 8 years ago

GPLv3 is fundamentally only concerned with keeping the open source parts of any software open source, so they can still be updated or patched in the spirit of free software, while proprietary parts remain closed source. In praxis the GPLv3 license is satisfied by shipping the application with shared versions of the libraries. That's without going into problematic cases, like using GPLv3 software behind a web front-end.