Relicense TomoPy to LGPL? #627
carterbox
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Hi TomoPy Users and Contributors,
Recently, there as been more activity and contributions to TomoPy from outside of Argonne. Including some from industry and some from other synchrontron fascilities. However, some of our potential collaborators have expressed interest in ensuring that any future works based on their contributions are kept free and open (not absorbed into proprietary codebases). To be honest, as the only active maintainer of TomoPy, I'm eager to attract more regular contributors. If that means modifying our license to a different OSI license, I'm OK with that.
As such, I propose converting the license of TomoPy to LGPL in a future release.
Our current license is BSD-3. This license is very permissive; it only requires that downstream users disclose that they are using some version of TomoPy by including the TomoPy license with their project. Downstream users can also directly modify the TomoPy source code into a new proprietary project which they can distribute without disclosing the source code or what changes they may / may not have made.
The change to LGPL v3 would still allow commercial and private use, but only as a dynamically linked / imported library. Any modifications to / derivatives of the TomoPy code itself, would need to be disclosed/published if the modified code is distributed. This forces downstream users to either keep propriety code separate from the TomoPy codebase or publish/contribute their modifications for everyone to see and use. The conversion from BSD to LGPL is one way; i.e.
Logistically, I will wait a month for comments, poll the admins for objections, then initiate the change by publishing a new major version of TomoPy.
-Daniel
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