laverdet / node-fibers

Fiber/coroutine support for v8 and node.
MIT License
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Get rid of libcoro #428

Open christian-bromann opened 4 years ago

christian-bromann commented 4 years ago

The embedded libcoro lib is licensed under GPL which is very restrictive and isn't compatible with popular OSS licenses like MIT. Is there a chance fibers can get rid of it or is it a dependencies that can not be changed?

christian-bromann commented 4 years ago

After refreshing my knowledge on OSS licenses (and I might be still wrong about this): for WebdriverIO it doesn't matter as the code is distributed as node-fibers which means it is not part of the WebdriverIO projects code. That said, you are licensing node-fibers as MIT and afaik if you include GPL licensed code you have to license your project under GPL too which brings me back to the question I raised original: can we get rid of libcoro?

laverdet commented 4 years ago

GPL doesn't affect "software as a service" which I'd guess is the vast majority of nodejs usage. I'm allowed to distribute my source as MIT and use a GPL library internally because I'm not distributing an application. node-fibers may technically be in violation of libcoro's license because I'm distributing binaries on npm but that's only a convenience for users who can't figure out how to install gcc.

christian-bromann commented 4 years ago

node-fibers may technically be in violation of libcoro's license

Hence my question: is it possible to get rid of it?

laverdet commented 4 years ago

Sure, it's possible but it's not something I want to work on. If you'd like to swap out the backend for something with a less restrictive license and do the legwork to verify there are no regressions I may accept pull request.