Mrs version 0.8

[Andrew McNabb]

I'm pleased to announce the release of Mrs version 0.8. This release
contains a huge number of improvements. Thanks to Jeff Lund, Kevin
Seppi, and Dan Hogue for major contributions for this release.

Mrs is a lightweight but high performance implementation of the
MapReduce programming model for parallel computation. Mrs is optimized
for computationally intensive programs, especially those that are
iterative, though it is applicable to a wide range of applications. It
is intended to be simple to install and use.

Mrs is written in Python, supports both Python 2 and Python 3, and has
no dependencies outside the standard library. It is licensed under the
GNU GPL.

Version 0.8 offers significant improvements to performance, stability,
and ease of use.

--
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868

[Andrew McNabb]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 10:22:25AM -0700, James Carroll wrote:
>
> Why not under the lgpl instead of the gpl? After all, if someone wants to
> use this for a larger product that is proprietary, then doesn't that
> essentially require linking, and therefore some lgpl license to make it
> work?
>
> I can only speak for my own use here, and say that I was planning on using
> mrs, but absolutely can't do it if I must open source all the code I write
> in order to use it. It's a deal breaker for me.

This is a very good question, and we've recently been considering making
a license change for these reasons. We delayed the decision for the
next release to allow further discussion about which particular license
to switch to, so it's great that you're asking.

One other thing that makes licenses awkward is that it's not quite clear
what they mean with respect to dynamic languages. For example, a Python
program that uses Mrs is not linked against it. Rather, it imports Mrs.
So, the way I see it and intend it, a Mrs-using application should be
able to run without being considered a derivative work, but as with most
things related to software license, we don't have a lot of legal
precedent to clarify how the courts interpret them.

Anyway, the more important part of the discussion, and the reason the
decision hasn't happen yet, is the question of what license should be
used instead of the GPL for Mrs. The main options are probably:

- LGPL
- Modified BSD License
- Apache License

Are there any thoughts about which of these to go with and why?