isaplib apache2 license

[Lucas Dixon]

Hi, 

I'd like to move the http://github.com/iislucas/isaplib to more permissible Apache2 license. 

I believe you all contributed to this at some point, would be awesome to have an email from each of you saying you are ok with that (assuming you are). :) 

cheers,

lucas

[Matvey Soloviev]

Hi Lucas,

Sure, that is okay with me.

(Long time no hearing from you, by the way. Hope you are doing well!)

Yours,
Matvey

[Aleks Kissinger]

Can you tell us why? Or is that classified?

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Quantomatic" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to quantomatic...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to quant...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/quantomatic.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Lucas Dixon]

lol, I wish. Persuading Google to use ML would be quite something!

TL;DR: Apache 2 is a more permissible license.

Longer story: 

When I originally selected the GPL license, I wasn't thinking very much about open-source projects and the realities of their existence - I saw a few other projects used this and I thought it would be easy to change later, and I kind of liked the viral nature of GPL. But it turns out that Apache 2 results in more contributions from external users in practice. The reason turns out to be relatively direct: companies avoid GPL source code because it is hard to have a forward guarentee that everything they will ever do is going to be GPL also. But companies still do have incentives to push fixes back to open-source repositories for Apache 2 code; if they don't they need to maintain their patches themselves. So it turns out that open-source projects get better supported by startups, industry and academia if their license is more open than GPL. The maximal standard for max openness for a software license is Apache 2.  TheoryMine illustrates this; for theorymine to use and send patches back to isaplib, I'd need isaplib to be apache 2. Otherwise theorymine has to use a much earlier version, and patch that. I'd prefer to their to be fewer variants of isaplib and for patches to benefit other projects, rather than just theorymine. 

[Aleks Kissinger]

But can't you do the same thing faster in C++? :-P

I think stopping a proliferation of needless forking is a good reason
to switch. I have long felt GPL is pretty draconian for what we are
doing, and wasn't quite sure why quanto et al was under it in the
first place. Perhaps we were all drinking the stallman kool-aid back
then.

I still remain curious about what has provoked this recent interest in
isaplib. Perhaps your mentioning theorymine was a clue....?

[Lucas Dixon]

Oh yeah, there's a couple of reasons for me looking at isaplib again: I am trying to fix a couple of things in theorymine, and open-source it. And Alan Bundy has someone who wants to do some work on it too. But it is not easy to work on Isabelle 2009 code - Isabelle's jedit mode was not good then. So I wanted to move to Isabelle 2015, and on route, that required looking at isaplib. :)

I am still not a fan of C++. But I have quite enjoyed writing typescript code (going from JS, it is relatively lovely!)