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pierrepo / PBxplore

A suite of tools to explore protein structures with Protein Blocks :snake:
https://pbxplore.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
MIT License
28 stars 17 forks source link

Update license to BSD? #157

Closed pierrepo closed 7 years ago

pierrepo commented 7 years ago

I like this remark taken from here

Illustrating how subtle language variations matter, we recently decided to change our pick to the BSD 3-clause License. It is very similar to the MIT License, but there is a small difference in the wording about attribution (which we learned about from a comment by A. Scopatz on a GitHub discussion thread).

The MIT License says:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

While BSD 3-clause says:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

As Scopatz noted, this language implies that a user could copy some of an MIT-licensed code (as long as the portion is deemed "not substantial") without attribution. In academia, we always prefer full attribution of any portions of copied works, and BSD 3-clause is more precise in this.

I propose we go to BSD license. What do you think @jbarnoud @HubLot ?

HubLot commented 7 years ago

I'm not fully competent to have a critical comparison between MIT and BSD so I let you decide guys :)

jbarnoud commented 7 years ago

I have nothing against any of these licenses. The 3-clauses BSD seems slightly less ambiguous, but I doubt the difference actually matters at the scale of the project.