On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 4:02 AM, Benoit Jacob
<jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,
This is a proposal to relicense Eigen to the new MPL2 license. Like
the LGPL3+ that Eigen is currently licensed under, this is a
weak-copyleft license. However, it is simpler, shorter, clearer, more
general, and slightly more liberal with a clear file-level copyleft.
the license:
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/
announcement:
http://mpl.mozilla.org/2012/01/03/announcing-mpl-2-0/
FAQ:
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/FAQ.html
Some positive press:
http://blogs.computerworlduk..com/simon-says/2012/01/can-mozilla-unify-open-source/index.htm
*** Disclaimers ***
1. I'm a Mozilla Corporation employee and I've followed closely the
MPL2 process, and provided some input into it as I really wanted it to
become a great alternative to the LGPL. So I guess I'm biased about
the MPL.
2. This has already been discussed privately among a small group of
core Eigen contributors. I'm not going to try to represent other
people's opinions in this email, so please do reply to this thread to
(re-)state your opinion.
*** Main questions to answer ***
While I'm interested in anything you may reply, here are the core
questions that I really want an answer to. I want to stress that they
are *separate* questions. These questions only concerns people who
have contributed code to Eigen. It's worth replying even if you only
have 1 line of code in Eigen.
1. Would you agree to a MPL2 relicensing of the code you've
contributed to Eigen?
Yes
2. Would you personally consider such a MPL2 relicensing of Eigen a
good or a bad thing?
b) Somewhat of a good thing
File-level copyleft boundaries are easy to explain. Before getting to the point of reading a shorter and better worded license, the reader needs motivation to do so. A uniform license for code+doc+examples is also convenient.
3. Which of the following courses of action would you consider the
best choice for Eigen?
b) Relicense to MPL2
c) Relicense to a liberal license (MIT/BSD).
Executive summary: I will remain an Eigen user and casual developer in both cases mentioned above. My stance on sending contributions would not change. Details follow.
If the scope of the discussion is limited to whether I favor the LGPL->MPL2 relicensing, then I favor it. Relicensing to a liberal BSD/MIT license would simplify my life a bit, as I work in the private sector. I maintain and keep track of local changes to a few LGPL-based projects we use, Eigen included, which need to ship with our products. Saving some overhead here wouldn't hurt. In the case of Eigen, I send all of my local changes upstream as patches, but sometimes it can take a while until they make it to the dev branch.
That being said, I understand if liberal licenses are not an option, and I don't mind tracking local changes. The alternative to doing this would be not to use Eigen, and that is definitely not an option. This project is close to my heart, and I greatly enjoy developing with it.
Cheers,
Adolfo.