On 03.08.2015 20:20, monkeynut wrote:
> If my code is GPL then proprietary companies will, if use becomes
> widespread, take the ideas and re-implement them (being unable and/or
> unwilling to contribute back).  If my code has a BSD license then it
> would be more economical (and legally feasible) for them to work off
> my code base and contribute improvements back as they integrate it
> with their products/appliances etc.

It would be economical and legally feasible for them only if they
intended to make proprietary code... I would prefer _not_ to make it
economical and legally feasible for them.

> Therefore I think if I use the GPL the ideas will flourish but my
> project will become a footnote in the history of that, whereas if I
> use BSD license I think it would live long and prosper. I think the
> Boost guys went with BSD style license instead of GPL style license
> because it gave them the best chance at being the de-facto libs for
> the things it covers. For example, you certainly found it useful to be
> able to choose your own license, and I suppose may not have used Boost
> graph libs if their license terms forced you to use Boost's own
> license (as you want a GPL style license).

You are judging the success of your project solely on weather or not it
is used by other people, lives long and so on.  Of course that is an
important part of it, but it is also important to consider the freedom
people have with it. There are many very "successful" scientific
programs out there, like Mathematica, that I think do a lot more harm
than good. Of course, a BSD program is not quite like that, but it can
become as soon as derivatives become proprietary.

In any case, this is the very old debate of copyleft vs noncopyleft, and
maybe it is not useful to rehash things here. I guess you and I have
simply different priorities.

> As the only person I know of who has written a python wrapper for BGL,
> would you be able to give me a few words about how 'hard' it is? Was
> this a fairly trivial part of graph-tool or a pretty huge part of the
> work?

It depends a lot. The BGL is a template library, so it is quite
versatile, and cannot be directly bound to python. Usually you have to
settle for a specific graph data structure and bind the specific
template instantiations for it. In graph-tool I wanted to keep some of
the versatility, so I compile several different instantiations that are
chosen at run time. This improves performance, but adds complexity.

(There is also an unmaintained, deprecated but "official" python
bindings for BGL: https://github.com/erwinvaneijk/bgl-python )

Best,
Tiago

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Tiago de Paula Peixoto <[hidden email]>


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