Consider a more permissive Open Source license instead of GPLv3

[f3ndot]

Hi there!

I'm looking to make some open source software that incorporates your lookup tables for parsing/decoding the T1T2A1A2ii header in some bulletins, sparing myself from trawling through the WMO publications and building my own tables (thank you for your work!).

Sadly, GPLv3 is a viral license. While not fully tested out in court, the intent and expectation by the FSF is that any software that "uses"/links/function calls a GPLv3-licensed library must subsequently, in its entirety, also be released under GPLv3. While the non-library portions of the software may be under another open source license (such as MIT for example), the final combined and distributed software must be GPL due to library used. While some people disagree with this interpretation, the FSF makes it pretty clear this is their stance.

I find this not particularly great. There are many good open source licenses out there that require attribution, source availability, etc. that protect authors maintain the goal of free software but cannot interoperate with GPLv3. In my view, a library released under GPLv3 therefore harms the open source community unless all derivative works wish to impose the same rigid dogmatic stance (ie also license as GPLv3). Even if this turns out not to be true, the amount of disagreement between programmers of what counts and what doesn't with GPLv3 I think suggests it's a problematic license to use in the first place.

In short, I would love to license my open source project under MIT, but if I use your library I cannot and am forced to also license the resulting software under GPLv3 (granted my source files could be under MIT). Would you be willing to change the license of the project to a more permissive open source license such as the Lesser GPL, MIT, Apache-2.0 or others? I see almost all repositories for wmo-im are either MIT or Apache 2.0 which are very permissive licenses.

Some references:

• https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1640/if-im-using-a-gpl-3-library-in-my-project-can-i-license-my-project-under-mit-l
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/87446/using-a-gplv3-python-module-will-my-entire-project-have-to-be-gplv3-licensed
• https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/sc9x3k/do_i_need_to_use_gplv3_if_i_use_a_gplv3_library/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#Compatibility_of_FOSS_licenses
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Libraries

[petersilva]

@f3ndot currently, the module is changing a lot due to changing requirements from WMO committees... it is not currently sufficiently stable, in my opinion for adoption.

@efucile I don't recall much discussion of the license chosen. We will do what the WMO wants us to do wrt licensing.

[petersilva]

Assigning to Enrico as the commit of the license is his.