More permissive license

[felixriese]

I have imported the spectral package into my code because it works great and is easy to use. It is a processing script of hyperspectral data, which I want to provide as open-source software here on GitHub. I want to provide it with a very permissive license, meaning MIT or BSD-3-Clause. With the GNU GPL2 licensed spectral package as import, this is not possible as far as I see it.

Can you please a) change the license of spectral to a more permissive license such as MIT or BSD-3-Clause, or b) give me permission to use your spectral package in my repository?

If not, please let me know. I think this is important information for every user of your package.

Thank you very much in advance!

[tboggs]

Hi Felix,

I've actually been considering migrating to the MIT license. I just need to finish a few other updates first and check with some contributors. You have my permission to use the package in your repository.

Regards, Thomas

[tboggs]

@donm , you have some significant code contributions - is it ok with you if the license gets changed to MIT? I've been considering this for a while. Several people (including myself) have had issues integrating the package with other projects that have more permissive licenses.

[donm]

Sure, that's fine.

Racket just went through a similar license change and they decided to dual-license under the Apache License (version 2), and the MIT license. I don't know if that's overkill for this project or not, but the issue has their reasons and the specific wording that they asked contributors to use when agreeing to change the license.

[tboggs]

Dual-licensing is probably overkill here. I don't see patent protection being a major issue so the MIT license should be fine. Thanks for the quick reply.

[tboggs]

@lewismc I've migrated spectral to the MIT license (currently on the mit-license branch). It appears that the license text on the Anaconda license badge on the README needs to be changed on the Anaconda spectral site to reflect the change in GitHub. Could you take care of making that change? I don't think I have an account over there.

[lewismc]

@tboggs I'll try to get to this tomorrow yes. Thanks

[lewismc]

@tboggs you need to check for other occurences of GPL or any other licenses. For example, see

https://github.com/spectralpython/spectral/blob/mit-license/setup.py#L20 https://github.com/spectralpython/spectral/blob/mit-license/setup.py#L29

[lewismc]

Here you go @tboggs let's track the recipe

https://github.com/conda-forge/spectral-feedstock/pull/4

[tboggs]

@lewismc good catch. I removed license headers from individual source files, changed the LICENSE file, and changed the trove classifiers but missed those two spots. Web site documentation is ready to go.

To avoid having the repo in a mixed state, I'll get the release ready, then accept your merge request just before merging and tagging the updated spectral repo (likely tomorrow).

Thanks again.

[lewismc]

@tboggs I pushed another commit to the feedstock... I hope this resolves the issue. This one became a bit of a PITA but thanks for your patience. 👍

[kormang]

Should this issue be closed?