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mrrwa / NmraDcc

NMRA Digital Command Control (DCC) Library
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
135 stars 53 forks source link

GPL vs MIT license #33

Closed vsky279 closed 4 years ago

vsky279 commented 4 years ago

Dear all,

I very much appreciate your work. This also why I took your driver and ported it in the NodeMCU Lua a Lua based interactive firmware for ESP8266, ESP8285 and ESP32. It has been merged already in the dev branch of the project. It works very well and I'm glad I can play with NMRA DCC in Lua.

However one of the senior developpers has recently raised an issue (#3025) pointing out that your code is distributed under GPL license. The NodeMCU Lua project is distributed under MIT license which I understand is a bit wider. Including GPL code would require the project to be under GPL which not something that is on the table.

Therefore I would like to ask you to consider relicensing your great project under MIT license :pray:. It would allow spreading it further into the world :smile:.

Thank you. Best regads,

bobjacobsen commented 4 years ago

The license is actually the LGPL 2, not the pure GPL. For discussion of the difference, see here and here.

If you want to use the LGPL'd NmraDcc with a MIT licensed project, i.e. NodeMCU Lua, you have to use NmraDcc as a library. Make the necessary changes either here in the mrrwa/NmraDcc or an appropriately licensed fork, then create binary libraries and include files that can be distributed to and referenced by the other project(s).

kiwi64ajs commented 4 years ago

Hi Guys,

I've just corrected the header text in the NmraDcc.[hc] files to be the "Lesser GPL" which is consistent with the original intent and committed the changes to the master branch in the Git repo.

I've also responded to this issue here: https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware/issues/3025#issuecomment-581324137

HTH Alex Shepherd