Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add explicit GPLv3 license to the files depending on pygmsh #446

Merged
merged 5 commits into from
Jul 30, 2020

Conversation

kinnala
Copy link
Owner

@kinnala kinnala commented Jul 29, 2020

Closes #445

@kinnala
Copy link
Owner Author

kinnala commented Jul 29, 2020

@gdmcbain and @ahhuhtal I suppose you're fine with this clarification?

@gdmcbain
Copy link
Contributor

Yes.

As noted in #445, ex19 depends on scikit-sparse which is itself two-clause BSD as a wrapper, but the CHOLMOD that it wraps is GPL 2.1.

https://github.com/PetterS/SuiteSparse/blob/27e5a8516464a6ac40bd3fa0e5b46e51b11f4765/CHOLMOD/Cholesky/cholmod_factorize.c#L5-L10

How does that work? I don't know. I figure splu will be fine.

@kinnala
Copy link
Owner Author

kinnala commented Jul 30, 2020

I think scikit-sparse README explains the rationale behind the licensing in a reasonable manner:

(The intent here is that if you, for example, buy a license to use CHOLMOD in a commercial product, then you can also go ahead and use our wrapper code with your commercial license.)

If the wrapper code was GPL-licensed and used together with a commercial license of CHOLMOD then technically distributing a commercial product based on those two would still require disclosing the source code of the wrapper code or any modifications made to it.

In Python code, dynamic linking happens only after a user runs the code in a Python interpreter on his own computer and some people have interpreted that only this is the step where the GPL-rot will spread, and hence justify different licensing of code that imports GPL-components, basically pushing the responsibility of licensing downstream. I have personally taken a different, more strict stance on this and consider anything that imports GPL 'dangerous' unless also GPL licensed.

As you can see, the whole GPL thing is a bit of a mess and that's why I try to stay out of it as much as I can.

@kinnala kinnala merged commit c5471cc into master Jul 30, 2020
@gdmcbain gdmcbain mentioned this pull request Aug 6, 2020
@kinnala kinnala deleted the clarify-example-licenses branch August 7, 2020 09:00
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

Clarify the licensing of the examples
2 participants