Software license?

[tony]

Normally Django plugin (python packages in general) are licensed MIT/BSD/ISC/etc.

This GPL license makes it tricky to incorporate (in fact in my case I'd end up writing something totally new)

https://github.com/ccnmtl/django-lti-provider/blob/master/LICENSE

django-lti-provider depends on several other free open-source software as
dependencies, which come with other licenses (compatible with the GPL)
specified in [ test_reqs.txt ] including Django
(http://www.djangoproject.com/) which is BSD-licensed.

It is true the BSD license django uses is compatible with GPL. So if
a GPL project were to want to incorporate this, it would probably be
okay. The issue is two things in my case:

1. As a django application, it's meant to be incorporated in a custom django project, which in
   many cases (I guess not CTL's? but for django developers in general)
   will be closed source (and probably permissively licensed if it was
   an open source project based on django-lti-provider).
2. BSD license is compatible with GPL, but not in the other direction.
   So if this package was licensed BSD, for instance, a GPL project
   is welcome to use it. But in the case of my project, it's not worth
   introducing it to the codebase (of a proprietary project) or downstream
   to an open source project.

(I think?) this may be true in general for other prospective users of this package.

[tony]

Any opinions on license in this?

PyLTI is BSD 2 Clause (https://github.com/mitodl/pylti)

Django is BSD (https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/LICENSE)

The difficulty is this can't be incorporated in a project the same way, even though it's open source

[sebhaase]

I would like to reraise this very issue. A GPL license makes it impossible to use this plugin!
At least changing to LGPL would allow to use it.
Especially consider that the libraries you are using - namely django-oauth and pylti - use a BSD license.
Otherwise one would have rewrite your modules in a very similar way.

Thanks,
Sebastian

[tony]

This is still an issue for me.

When someone writes a web app, their intention is to make a new creation, not to become a viral derivative of a django package that (hopefully!) helped them in the process.

[sebhaase]

Otherwise https://github.com/dmitry-viskov/pylti1.3 might be a newer option anyway...