search

qutip / qutip-tutorials

QuTiP Tutorials
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
33 stars 34 forks source link

Reconsider whether it is okay to re-license from LGPL-3.0 to BSD-3. #3

Closed hodgestar closed 2 years ago

hodgestar commented 2 years ago

As noted in #1, the qutip-notebooks repository used LGPL-3.0 but this repository is using BSD-3 for consistency with qutip and qutip-qip. Is this license change permitted, or do we need to keep the old LGPL-3.0 license? We need to check.

hodgestar commented 2 years ago

One of the reasons I changed to the BSD license is that LGPL is a very odd license to use for a repository of Jupyter notebooks. The reason for the LGPL existing is to allow other projects to link to a library at run time -- which is not something that notebooks can typically do.

hodgestar commented 2 years ago

It looks like we can't just re-license to BSD -- https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6698/can-i-use-code-from-an-lgpl-v2-licenced-project-in-a-bsd-3-clause-licenced-proje. However, that creates a bit of a mess because QuTiP is not licensed under the LGPL (e.g. we could not use code from the notebooks in QuTiP).

I propose that we attempt to re-license by contacting all the contributors and asking their permission. Most of the contributors are QuTiP admins or affiliates, but there are only 15 of us in total, so it's probably achievable. I will email qutip-admin and ask.

hodgestar commented 2 years ago

Getting permission from contributors to re-license is being tracked in https://github.com/qutip/qutip-notebooks/issues/146.

hodgestar commented 2 years ago

Permission obtained from all contributors. Re-licensing complete. We can continue to use the BSD license in this repository. \o/