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(a)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