Licensing

[montefra]

Hi,

Astropy and astropy helpers are licenced using the 3 clause BSD licence, while xpa and pyds9 using the LGPL.

Although, not legally binding, I think that this wikipedia entry means that we can put together LGPL and BSD licence in the same project.

I think that if we keep pyds9 as LGPL there should also no problem of using xpa (I don't know if binding c code to python via ctypes is the same as linking).
Furthermore the BSD licensed code is not part of the core of the package, so it doesn't directly link/connect to xpa.

@ericmandel @cdeil: any though or knowledge on this? Do you know if/who can we contact in the astropy devs to ask for counsel if needed?

[cdeil]

I thought license was discussed a few weeks ago and @ericmandel said relicensing under a more liberal license is possible? (I might mis-remember).

There was a thread on the Astropy mailing list recently discussing licensing that I found useful.
It starts here. Probably Perry Greenfield would be a good address to ask licensing question. But let's see what @ericmandel thinks first.

[ericmandel]

XPA is now under MIT and we can do the same for pyds9.

I don't know much about this but I think we would be safer combining MIT and BSD than LGPL and BSD:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/121998/mit-vs-bsd-vs-dual-license
http://choosealicense.com/licenses/

The LGPL was less restrictive than the GPL in the late 90's, when none of these other licenses were available. I'm in favor of the MIT license now, but it looks like you can dual license with MIT and BSD if there is an astropy-related reason to do so.

[montefra]

Ok, thanks for the feedback. I'll give a look at those links.

[ericmandel]

It's here: https://github.com/ericmandel/xpa

I probably should have the saord XPA web page point to github. I don't really see making any more releases of XPA via a tar file.

[montefra]

ohh nice.

We can add xpa as a submodule, this makes much easier to keep it in sync, and we don't need to have a separate copy of it in pyds9.

[ericmandel]

That would be good, but I have to rely on your GitHub expertise for that ...

I changed the XPA Web page on the old CfA Web site to point to GitHub as repository, so everyone will get the same version ...