Licensing issue BSD/GPL

[Cédric Boutillier]

Hi!

Looking closer at the gems used for sciruby, I stumbled upon a legal
problem: some of the gems are distributed with a GPL license (like
minimization and distribution). According to the FAQ on the GNU website,

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL

Code that uses GPL libraries must be published under a license that is
compatible with the GPL. The last paragraph of the section indicated by
the link uses the example of Perl, but it applies as well to our
situation with Ruby.

This has been discussed on debian...@lists.debian.org some time ago,
for a specific example about Ruby, at the end of this message:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2011/05/msg00018.html

Note that my knowledge on licenses is not tremendous, but I believe the
people in debian-legal or the FSF know what they talk about.

So there are several issues:
- SciRuby is BSD-2-clause (not GPL compatible), whereas it uses
minimization and distribution which are GPL,
- integration is X11 (not GPL compatible), but may use ruby-gsl, which
is GPL.

The last point may be circumvented, since ruby-gsl is only loaded if it
is present. However, from a practical point of view, it is a bit sad to
restrict available performances just for license consideration.

I know that the license of SciRuby has been discussed several times, the
last time being in a thread about GSL this August.

I see thus two options:
- a change of license for SciRuby should be considered (again!),
- SciRuby stays BSD-2-clause, but minimization and distribution (and
maybe others) need to drop GPL and move to a more laxist license.

May I ask your point of view on this matter? I am sorry to bother you
with this administrative stuff, but it is important if the project is to
be distributed publicly.

Cheers,

Cédric

[Claudio Bustos]

SciRuby:

Hi. I'm the dev of minimization, distribution and statsample. At this point, I prefer to put the libraries on public domain. What to you think?

I'm very tired of this license stuff....

--
Claudio Bustos
Psicólogo
clbu...@gmail.com

[John Woods]

Does statsample still have code from GSL in it? We need to check with the original authors of that particular GSL code to see what they'll allow.

John

[Claudio Bustos]

Statsample doesn't need GSL to work, but can loads the library on demand.

[John Woods]

Sorry, I mean distribution, not statsample.

Some of the distributions are Ruby code translated from GSL's C code. We talked about this a few months ago. It was okay since distribution is GPL, but if we switch licenses, it could be problematic.

John

[Carlos Agarie]

I'm sorry for the ignorance, but why SciRuby is BSD-2-clause? What licenses are compatible with it?

I feel sorry for Claudio, this appears to be a giant headache indeed. :(

2012/10/17 John Woods <john.o...@gmail.com>

--
Carlos Agarie
Control engineering student

Polytechnic School
University of São Paulo

[Cédric Boutillier]

Hi!

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 11:47:59AM +0200, Cédric Boutillier wrote:

> So there are several issues:
> - SciRuby is BSD-2-clause (not GPL compatible), whereas it uses
> minimization and distribution which are GPL,
> - integration is X11 (not GPL compatible), but may use ruby-gsl, which
> is GPL.

I apologize for my previous email. Reading again some material today
made me understand that I wrongly interpreted the references I gave, and
I probably raised what is in fact a non-issue.

It seems that the current situation is ok. Indeed,
BSD-2-clause and X11 *are* GPL-compatible licenses:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

As long as SciRuby is not distributed together with files licensed under
GPL, then BSD-2-clause license is ok. Sorry again for the noise.

Cédric

[Cédric Boutillier]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 01:07:41PM -0300, Claudio Bustos wrote:
> SciRuby:

> Hi. I'm the dev of minimization, distribution and statsample. At this
> point, I prefer to put the libraries on public domain. What to you think?

I am not sure it would solve the problem. Public domain is not a license
per se, and should be accompanied with some text stating that you drop
your rights, which may be not easier than chosing a license.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain

As I wrote before, the situation may stay as it is, unless you were
considering a relicensing to BSD-2-clause.

> I'm very tired of this license stuff....

Yeah, it is (for me at lease) the non fun part of free software.

Cédric

[Claudio Bustos]

Mhhh...I will change the license to BSD type. I'm prefer the logic behind GPL (protect the user from propietary implementations), but causes more troubles than benefits in our case.

[John Woods]

How about 2-clause BSD, to be consistent with sciruby/nmatrix?

[Claudio Bustos]

John:

No problem. Next week I will update the libraries.

[JR Boyens]

Sorry to dredge up an old topic, but I was looking to use some of the SciRuby libraries in a project and am curious as to the current licensing situation. A number of the repositories and dependencies of statsample are still using GPLv2 and it seems like from this thread there was consensus on moving to a 2-clause BSD license.

Was there a another direction taken or did something just get accidentally missed? I'll be happy to provide pull requests for all repositories so that it's a simple click in Github.

Thanks,

-- JR

[Claudio Bustos]

Hi to all:

Sorry, a lot of work here. If you are nice to make the pulls, I don't any problem on merge on main trunk.

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[Magdalen Berns]

On Thursday, 18 October 2012 13:45:12 UTC+1, clbustos wrote:

Mhhh...I will change the license to BSD type. I'm prefer the logic behind GPL (protect the user from propietary implementations), but causes more troubles than benefits in our case.

I don't really like BSD either for the same reasons and was wondering about this because of the GPL on fftw3. What troubles does GPL cause SciRuby?

[Claudio Bustos]

All my libraries should be BSD right now.  If someone needs the gpl license,  should fork from previous version.

--

[John Woods]

Magdalen,

I would refer you back to the mailing list discussion (which you can search in our Google Group) on BSD versus GPL.

John

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