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@xxxxxxxxx> 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 _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
