License

[ramack]

While browsing through the code I stumbled over the "GPL v3 or later" statement of the SHA256 implementation for AVR while the mysensors code seems to be GPLv2-only

according my understanding GPLv2 and GPLv3+ are incompatible and therefore cannot be linked together.

[henrikekblad]

Good observation. If you enable sha256 on AVR there will be a license clash. We'll have to discuss how to handle it in the core team (a bit slow over the holidays though).

[ramack]

no hurry, IANAL and I will not charge you :smile: Why not changing all to GPLv3+?

While you are at license topics, maybe you can answer my question about the CLA / dual licensing that I raised in the forum

[henrikekblad]

Haha.. we're not lawyers either ;) The CLA was put into place for situations just like this. E.g. we wanting move the MySensors library to a GPLv3 license without having to ask all previous contributors. It also opens up a possibility for a company to embed the MySensors core into some proprietary hardware thingie by using a "commercial" license (hasn't happened yet).

Anyhow. I can conclude that licensing isn't super easy. Wish I had a little OSS savvy lawyer friend somewhere.

[ramack]

I'd like to meet that guy too, please 😃 I understand that you want to allow a commercial use, but then maybe it is better to directly select a license without copyleft, or explicitly dual license it from the beginning. Currently for me it has a slight smell, as I as a potential contributor would need to give rights to you without knowing you and without a clear view of what you will or will not do with this right. The integration of external code is always problematic - with the current CLA and with dual licensing...

[dwrobel]

I'd like to release a project which will take advantage of your great MySensors library and I would prefer, for my project, to select GPLv3+ as this gives me more flexibility to use any other library, independently of its license (see GPL compatibility matrix).

So, it would be appreciated if you could considering changing MySensors header as follows:

$ git di MySensors.h 
diff --git a/MySensors.h b/MySensors.h
index 79b86517..93a40bf7 100644
--- a/MySensors.h
+++ b/MySensors.h
@@ -14,7 +14,8 @@
  *
  * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
- * version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
+ * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
+ * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
  */

I hope this shouldn't affect your dual licensing model (see here).

[ramack]

any news about licensing?

[ramack]

any news? It is not a good state to keep a free software project in a known license clash situation for nearly 4 years!

I strongly recommend to fix that!