[eigen] Using Eigen in commercial software

[Bill Greene <w.h.greene@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Eigen Developers,

I have been an enthusiastic user of Eigen for the past several years.

Many thanks for writing such a wonderful matrix class library!

Recently I started work at a commercial software company and would

like to use Eigen as part of my commercial development work. It seems

clear to me that this type of usage is permitted. But I have to obtain

approval from the company's lawyers and they would not give this approval.

First off, they will not consider any software licensed under LGPL3. 

I pointed out that most of the software had recently been re-licensed under

MPL and pointed them to the email threads that, to me, indicated a very

careful, thorough process followed during re-licensing. According to them,

the licensing process was not legally sufficient and their complaints

appear to focus on this sentence:

"Aside from 3rd-party code, there remain only about 50 changesets

without re-licensing approval, they all seem to be from contributors

who contributed at most 2 changesets to Eigen, and 50 changesets is

about only 1% of the total."

They claim that the potential exists for as many as 50 developers to

challenge the legality of the re-licensing process.

Can anything more be said about these 50 changesets? Is it possible to

avoid the code that includes these changes?

Sorry to bother you guys with this issue particularly since it seems clear

to me that the re-licensing process you followed showed due diligence.

But I'll be very disappointed not to be able to use Eigen in my upcoming

work and I'm looking for any data I can use to convince the lawyers this

should be allowed.

Thanks.

Bill