[pdb-discuss] Copyright and licensing of pdw material

Thu Nov 23 13:50:03 UTC 2006

Quoting Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:

> 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.

Kewl.

> 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 *

This is the same as using a library in C, and the logic for the GPL being
triggered by this case in Python is the same as for C.

> 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.

I do generally believe in respecting community standards (even where they are
not ideal ;-)). Could we use the LGPL though?

- Rob.