Hi Tiago,

Thanks for the quick response.

I see what you are saying and why you chose the GPL. I suppose its just frustrating to have to re-think (or even think much about!) licensing when it hasn't been an issue for the bulk of my work.

The bits where I need the much better (and distributed) performance from your library is a graph generation/storage and analysis service.
It holds a bunch of graphs, quantifies topology on them, and identifies interesting groups of nodes/edges, returning the results via JSON (the analysis component needs to be able to run on a different machine from other bits of it - inputs are also JSON based API). Basically a generic "graph stuff" network service which implements the bits I need for the rest of the project.

From what I understand I can keep the original networkx version of this service and also develop a graph-tool version, the former staying with a BSD license and the latter having a GPL license.
However, one of my friends said that many would see that as "cheating" but it seems to be an intentional provision of the GPLv3 as far as I understand.

How would you view that scenario? Would you be OK with it or would you be upset/feel violated? Would your position change if I couldn't keep up maintaining both versions?

FYI I'm not a developer for any company, infact I'm not even a developer by trade (ex. pentester now security architect).

Cheers,
Tim

On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 12:59 PM, Tiago Peixoto [via Main discussion list for the graph-tool project] <[hidden email]> wrote:
On 01.08.2015 19:34, monkeynut wrote:
> I have now spent weeks reading the FSF, GPLv3, BSD, Boost etc. license pages
> and guides and all sorts of stuff. Plenty of (people claiming to be) lawyers
> who all disagree about what to do and where I stand (most of it involving
> disagreements about derivative works). I would love to just get back to
> design and development, something I'm actually good at!

The standard interpretation is that derivations (including software that
uses the library) must be released under the same license, or a
compatible one. In the case of graph-tool, that would be the GPLv3 or
any later version.

> The obvious solution would be just to GPL everything but given the amount of
> pain the draconian and anti-liberal GPLv3 has given me, I don't want to
> inflict that on anyone else in the future if possible. Additionally, there
> are a number of people I would like to work with who would be unable due to
> contractual contraints to risk using my project if it were GPL.

It only inflicts pain if you (or others) desire or leave open the
possibility of using it as part of proprietary code. It is pretty much
the whole point of the GPL to make this impossible, or at least very
difficult.

> Has anybody had a similar situation and how have you resolved it? Can
> anybody help? Tiago, if you could give me any advice about your intentions
> behind choosing GPLv3 over e.g. LGPL and how my project relates to that (is
> this something we should discuss off-line)?

My choice for using the GPL is the same, I presume, than anyone else
that leans towards copyleft. I want don't want anyone to be restricted
to use or modify the library or any variations by any third party.

If you are free to choose your own licence, using anything else means
you don't care about further restrictions being imposed.

The LGPL makes an exception for just linking (importing) the library,
which can make strategic sense in some cases, but I judged it not to be
the case for graph-tool.

Best,
Tiago

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