[GRASS5] why GPL

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Strobe,

having read through the whole thread about the GPL licensing of
GRASS I have decided to answer to your original points and add
my comments from there.  I have been the one who provided counseling
to Bruce and Markus about various licensing questions and finally
about the strength and weaknesses of the GNU GPL.


On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 07:03:59AM -0800, strobe anarkhos wrote:
> Why is GRASS licensed under the GPL? 
> I would think the LGPL would be far more appropriate. 

The GRASS user and development community decided to license GRASS
under the GPL. It was a long discussion and we will probably not
change the general decision quickly if at all.

> It is possible for the authors of the original code to re-release
> their code under the LGPL or another license. 

In theory this is possible, but in practice it is not.
We are glad that we managed to get most authors which are not active
to agree to get their code licensed as free software at all.

> If we decide to restructure GRASS I think this would be a very
> very good idea.  People who may want to write plugings (views,
> commands (and other controllers), etc.) for the GRASS framework I
> propose may want to use their own license. If the code is only
> released in GPL form that's not allowed given the current (read:
> RMS) interpretation of the GPL.

This is not entirely correct.
You can release your own code under any license you wish,
but you can only use it together with the GPL, if it is GPL compatible.
And you can only distribute it under the stronger protection of the GPL.
But in principle you can write a GRASS extension and license it
under MIT (which would make it dual licensed for practical reasons).

> If however it were licensed under the LGPL people could use the
> framework without making their code GPL. I mean what if somebody
> wants to write an intricate shareware view for a particular
> platform? 

There were quite a number of incidents were GRASS code was taken and
used in proprietary software which most GRASS developer did not
like. So we have decided against the possibility of proprietory
software linking against GRASS.

> Nobody is forced to use his view and custom controllers,
> but some may want to even if they don't get the source. 

And this is excatly the danger: 
If end users get accustomed to the proprietary enchancements,
the owner of the proprietary rights to get power over the GRASS
development. The GPL is the license which protects against this and
thus most firmly ensures the long term freedom of the software.

	Bernhard

-- 
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