[pdb-discuss] Copyright and licensing of pdw material

Thu Nov 23 12:49:26 UTC 2006

rob at robmyers.org wrote:
> Quoting Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
> 
>> Is this satisfactory? If not what changes do people want?
> 
> 
> Can we please use GPL / BY-SA. This project is about reclaiming value 
> for the
> community, and those licenses better reflect that. I appreciate that MIT 
> /BY is
> closer in spirit to public domain, but that isn't necessarily a good 
> thing for
> new work intended as a community resource. This project definitely 
> shouldn't be
> gracenote-able for example, and GPL/BY-SA protects against that where 
> MIT/BSD
> doesn't.

Good point Rob and I think using BY-SA is an excellent idea. For the 
code though I would kie to keep MIT (or LGPL). My reason for this is 
that, AFAICT, because of the nature of python using GPL has very strong 
implications for anyone else including those who simply use our code as 
a library i.e. doing

from pdw import *

where the underlying library is GPL requires you to GPL your code. As a 
result much of the python community use a 'weaker' license such as the 
LGPL or the MIT.

Regards,

Rufus