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bhollis / maruku

A pure-Ruby Markdown-superset interpreter (Official Repo).
MIT License
500 stars 80 forks source link

Switch to MIT license #77

Closed bhollis closed 11 years ago

bhollis commented 11 years ago

I would like to switch Maruku to the MIT license, away from GPLv2, for the upcoming version 0.7.0. The Ruby community generally uses MIT for libraries, and MIT is easy to incorporate in many types of projects. GPLv2's viral nature makes it difficult to use Maruku as a library, since it requires that any other library or program that uses it also be licensed under GPLv2. Right now Maruku is used by many projects, most of which are in conflict with the GPLv2 license.

To relicense, I would like the written consent of the top contributors/creator of the library. That would be @AndreaCensi, @distler, and @nex3. I'd appreciate it if each of you would comment on this issue with whether or not you are OK with relicensing the library.

nex3 commented 11 years ago

I don't think I actually have much code in here, but it's fine by me.

distler commented 11 years ago

I am highly supportive of such a switch.

bhollis commented 11 years ago

I've emailed @AndreaCensi several times, but haven't gotten any response. Maybe he's on vacation?

Kramdown has recently switched to the MIT license, which makes it better than Maruku in pretty much every way - speed, correctness, and now licensing. I'm reluctant to keep working on Maruku if I can't relicense it. I'll give it another few weeks, but if I can't get @AndreaCensi's buyoff on the switch, I might just declare the project dead.

AndreaCensi commented 11 years ago

Hi folks. Sorry for the delay in answering. I wish it was vacation! it was interview season for me. And lately I have been working 24/7 in my basement lab (and learning video editing: https://vimeo.com/63454956).

Also, I procrastinated this answer a bit because, with limited time, I felt uncomfortable discussing the old topic of MIT vs GPL vs other licenses. I suppose there are many different perspectives, also depending on one's work situation (is it a hobby? do I want to integrate this work in my closed-source consulting jobs? etc.)

The long philosophical discussion will be delayed until the day I randomly meet with one of you in front of a beer. Looking forward especially to discuss it with Jacques, as a fellow academic with the hobbyist perspective. Should we not use (L)GPL viral nature to give a competitive advantage to open source?

Anyway, I subscribe to a democratic principle in which vote is weighted by the amount of contribution to the project, and I suspect that the sum of all other people's effort on Maruku is now larger (or it will be soon larger) than the effort I put in originally. So, yeah, let's switch to MIT.

bhollis commented 11 years ago

Thanks Andrea! Sorry for bugging you so much about this. And I'd love to get a beer with everyone sometime to talk about all this stuff.

I did consider LGPL - it's a good license, and I like the terms, but it's vague in some areas (what does linking mean for Ruby?) and in a corporate environment there's a lot of (often unnecessary) fear around the viral clauses. LGPL is also uncommonly used in the Ruby community. I felt that MIT would be best for encouraging both adoption and contribution.

Thanks again, everyone, for lending your support to this change!

distler commented 11 years ago

Andrea,

It'll be my pleasure to have a beer with you, in Austin, or Pasadena or wherever you end up (good luck on the job search!). We can discuss Robotics, or String Theory or ... umh ... software licenses, as you wish.