[bip] changing the Pygr license?

[Titus Brown]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 03:13:32PM -0700, Christopher Lee wrote:
-> Based on feedback from a number of people who felt that the GPL  
-> license was too limiting, I'm thinking of changing the Pygr license  
-> from GPL to BSD, but would first like to get people's advice about  
-> what they think would be the best license to use.  I only used GPL  
-> originally because it seemed to be what people favored at the time.   
-> If people now feel that GPL is too restrictive, we can change the  
-> license.  In my view, the main purpose of the license is just to  
-> ensure that the software is as useful as possible to people, within a  
-> reasonable set of assumptions about sharing and attribution.   Based  
-> on the discussion on this group, it sounds like people prefer BSD.
-> 
-> I'd be very grateful for comments on this proposed change...

Hi, Chris,

here's the latest on the BSD license:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

My sense is that this is the widest possible license: the only
restriction on using the software, or redistributing the source code, is
that one cannot

	- change the copyright or license on the source or binary

	- use the original authors to endorse products built with the code

Then anyone can use or change the software however they want.

The other license that I could suggest is the LGPL, which would permit
people to build their own software on top of pygr without contaminating
their own code with the LGPL license, while requiring that they
contribute improvements to pygr back to you and the community.  However,
enough people are scared of *GPL that I think BSD is the better way to
go.

cheers,
--titus