On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 05:20:48PM +0200, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
On Sat, 4 Jul 2020 at 16:20, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek@in.waw.pl wrote:
Would the maintainer consider switching the whole thing to LGPLv3? This would preserve the freeness of his code and be much less hassle for everyone involved, with no interpretation of new legal texts required.
LGPL has other implications towards proprietary software, and that's what the authors specifically want to protect, so that's a hard line.
I'm not sure what you mean. LGPL keeps the code free but allows it to be freely combined with software under different licenses, which is what we want in this case.
Yeap, but it's more permissive also with the FlexiBLAS interface (the one that enables hooking into the duplicated BLAS/LAPACK interface, the one that BLAS/LAPACK consumers are not using), and this is what the authors do not want.
OK. Thanks for the clarification.
Maybe talk with the authors and tell them that a few functions to provide this extra interface are not important enough to create all the hassle with GPLv3 for a commonly used library and that LGPL would protect their code almost as well? I assume that they want their library to be widely used, and this strict licensing will be a constant source of problems because many existing scientific packages are using more liberal licensing and will not want to change their licensing to accommodate flexiblas.
Wouldn't the Classpath Exception [1] be appropriate here? This wouldn't require the interpretation of a new legal text.
Classpath exception talks about "executable". This isn't very precise, but at least in normal speech, a library is not an executable, so the classpath exception would not cover other libraries which link to flexiblass. So for example, numpy would not be covered by the exception.
True. But what about the "Linking over a controlled interface exception"? That sounds like exactly this case: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface
Yep, that seems like it would work. The first para contains a legal interpretation of GPLv3 and thus doesn't belong in the exception text. But the rest is OK.
Zbyszek