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mesonbuild / meson-python

Meson PEP 517 Python build backend
https://mesonbuild.com/meson-python/
MIT License
131 stars 69 forks source link

Choice of software license #61

Closed rgommers closed 2 years ago

rgommers commented 2 years ago

I didn't notice before that the current license currently is EUPL (European Union Public License). This is a weak-copyleft license, and it seems to prevent potentially incorporating code from this package in Meson itself (which is Apache 2.0), or any BSD/MIT licensed package (that includes most of the PyData ecosystem).

Is there a reason for this choice of license @FFY00?

P-E-SCHMITZ commented 2 years ago

The EUPL is, by decision C(2021) 8759 of the European Commission, the license covering all EC software distributions, but it is also used by a growing number of enterprises. It is not viral and compatible with a list of other copyleft licences. Code can by linked (even statically) with Apache or BSD components without impacting their licensing conditions. But when EUPL covered code is really merged into such components, the EUPL must cover the combined derivative if distributed to third parties. EUPL copyleft is rather strong (than weak) because most conditions (i.e. coverage of remote distribution and the obligation to provide access to source code) are persistent, even when a compatible license can be used for a derivative. Indeed, the compatible license prevails when its provisions are in conflict with those of the EUPL, which is rarely the case. EUPL Guidelines 2021 EN.pdf

rgommers commented 2 years ago

We discussed this, there's no reason for EUPL right now other than personal preference. Given that the Python ecosystem is mostly MIT/BSD, and that is the license that is also the most permissive for code reuse in Meson/SciPy/etc. So we're going to change to MIT.