search

felix-lang / felix

The Felix Programming Language
Other
805 stars 43 forks source link

The license should be changed to MIT or something similarly permissive #168

Open ahribellah opened 2 years ago

ahribellah commented 2 years ago

I've read that public domain/"free for any use" licenses make people jumpy because they're concerned about it being a legal gray area. It might be that the license alone has kept some people away and the MIT license is permissive enough that people won't worry about what they can/can't do with MIT-licensed software.

skaller commented 2 years ago

It's hard to find a suitable licence. MIT licences require accreditation which I like to have but do not want to enforce. CC0 is the same: its free for any use but accreditation required. The situation is made more difficult because some third party software is used which have their own licences (all of them are liberal or I wouldn't use them). In some cases, Felix has bindings to non-free software eg GNU's GMP and GSL. Weird to call that stuff non-free but it is not free of legal incumbrance. However the bindings are, you just need to install the library as a third party library.

I have been thinking for a while without action about a licensing system that allows the licence of components to be queried, and, to filter compilation to exclude unacceptable licences, or, to actually produce a licence set for generated stuff .. but in the end, i'm an anarchist and it's hard to put this as a high priority.