Dual Licensing
Closed this issue · 19 comments
Could you consider dual licensing with BSD so that the GPL does not come into play on OSX. As it stands, any software requiring the lib will otherwise require it to licensed under the GPL. In contrast to linux, OSXFuse is under BSD Terms. Alternatively licensing under the LGPL might be an appropriate balance of both which would could also resolve its use in particular circumstances.
Good question.
I am a maintainer but no longer owner of this repo, since I left the company a month ago. Let me try to ask the company if I can add a 2nd license.
@bcle Thanks. I appreciate this. This lib looks interesting to me and it is encouraging to see vmware's support behind it.
Any news? Otherwise I will fork the project and upload it with a new name to npmjs!
VMW legal told me they're looking into it. In case we have to fork, any suggestions for a new name?
@elwerene @bcle Hi. Forking and renaming would not change its GPL nature. The authors must make the change. I like this implementation. The fact that JavaScript is a dynamic language would mean your entire project would need to be GPL to use this module and comply. This is problematic for many. There is a second lib available under MIT that another author has been hacking on. Hoping VMWare will come back with a positive response.
@fairwinds You can use my bindings for the low level FUSE API. They are under the MIT license and I'm also looking for contributors to help me finish it up :) https://github.com/c4milo/fusejs
I'd also love to hear good news on this. :)
OK, finally heard from VMW. It took them months to finally get VP level approval. They agreed to transfer ownership to me, as long as I leave the VMW copyright notice intact on code that was developed while I was at the company. I moved the repo from vmware/fuse4js to bcle/fuse4js.
Now, I don't have experience with modifying or adding licenses to an open source project. Can the existing license be revoked and changed to a more permissive one? Or does a new one need to be added? Can somebody suggest a change and post a pull request that I can review?
Hi, this is good news. On the licensing side, it is only important to choose the license and ensure that VMW agrees with the license change as the copyright holder before you fork (or take responsibility for the code). I recommend the MIT license because is permissive and compatible with the GPL license (where it can still be included in GPL'd projects as needed).
You can see jQuery recently went from a dual MIT/GPL license to using only the MIT License due to its GPL compatibility http://blog.jquery.com/2012/09/10/jquery-licensing-changes
I would keep documentation for yourself indicating VMW's approval for the switch to the MIT license, make a commit with the new license in the VMW repo, and tag a new release.
If you will be maintaining the code in a different location on github, you can either fork after making the license change, or have VMW transfer the repo to you. If there is a continuation within the same repo in the VMW github account, just a new license and tag are required.
License changes normally mean that anyone that committed code must agree to the new license. if all code is owned by VMW and they are transferring ownership, that is great. That said, just make sure they have consented to the MIT because any changes or modification to the code will be descendent from the original work from the original copyright holder.
Thanks for the info. VMW has indicated in writing that they'll approve any license change, and that they only care about the copyright notices. The repo has been permanently transferred to https://github.com/bcle/fuse4js
In terms of past contributors, they are sidorares, thejh, gierschv, and elwerene. I'll ask them if they agree to the change to MIT and post to this thread.
Hi all,
I don't have objections against license change. Can we have PR with new license so it's merged after we have 👍 from all contributors?
MIT is a good choice! I'm in 👍
You can distribute that tiny contribution I made under any license you want.
woot!
Hello, did you have any news from gierschv on this ?
You all seem to have studied the differences between @c4milo's fusejs and this project : do you see the best of both worlds merging when both libraries are MIT ? what are the pros/cons according to you for both libraries ?
It would be nice to unite our efforts here, for example to add nan supports to the libraries otherwise it will be difficult to reach node 0.11.x support. https://www.npmjs.org/package/nan
Ok for me 👍