Relicense notebooks to BSD license
hodgestar opened this issue · 30 comments
As part of the GSoC QuTiP notebooks upgrade, I discovered that the qutip-notebooks are licensed under the LGPL. This was likely a mistake made ages ago (2013) and I would like to propose that we relicense the notebooks to the BSD license. Reasons and what's entailed follow:
Why relicense?
- The LGPL license is a GPL license with an exception that allows software to link to a library at run-time without also having to be (L)GPLed. The qutip-notebooks repository doesn't contain a library.
- qutip and our other Python packages use the BSD licenses, which is not a copyleft license.
- As things stand, we don't have permission to use code from qutip-notebooks in qutip itself, and no one using qutip-notebooks could distribute copied or modified versions of code from qutip-notebooks without also licensing their work as LGPL.
- I don't think this situation makes much sense and I don't think it's what we or many of our users want. Currently our users would have to license their wrork as (L)GPL if they used a snippet of code from an example notebook.
What's required to make the change?
- Since the LGPL doesn't grant us the freedom to distribute the notebook under a BSD license, we'll need to ask all contributors for permission to release their work under a BSD license.
- Luckily there are only ~15 contributors, and most of them are contactable.
- If we can't contact everyone, we can not re-license the specific notebooks affected (hopefully a small number).
License change PR
- See #145 for the PR proposing the change to the BSD license.
Re-licensing checklist
Below is a check list of the contributors we need to get permission to relicense from (in order of number of commits at the time of making the list):
- jrjohansson
- anubhavvardhan
- hodgestar
- BoxiLi
- ajgpitch
- christian512
- quantshah
- nathanshammah
- JonathanUlm
- sbisw002
- kafischer
- nonhermitian
- nwlambert
- Ericgig
- cgranade
- stared
- AGaliciaMartinez
- pmenczel
- arnelg
- Vutshi
- Amelie-og
- fminga
- bencbartlett
- deeksha-singh030
- Leo-am
- jakelishman
- IvanIsCoding
In order to check someone off the list, they need to agree in writing to have their contributions released under the BSD license, preferably by write a comment on this issue stating "I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license."
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to qutip-notebooks relicensed under BSD.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
Good idea.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
@arnelg @Vutshi @fminga @deeksha-singh030 @IvanIsCoding @JonathanUlm @sbisw002 Apologies for directly pinging you. We'd like to re-license the QuTiP notebooks to BSD and it would be extremely helpful to have your permission to re-license your respective contributions.
You can do so by writing something like "I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license." as a comment in this issue.
The issue description contains more details on why we'd like to make this change.
Thank your for reading and please let me know if you have any questions.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license
Sure, whatever works best for the project!
Personally, I am much more in favor of MIT/BSD licenses for their permissive nature.
So, hereby:
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
As a side remark, I cite QuTiP in my recent publication:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13300
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
@nonhermitian wrote to me by email and gave permission to relicense their contributions.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
@kafischer wrote to me by email and gave permission to relicense their contributions.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license. :)
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
@anubhavvardhan @Leo-am Apologies for directly pinging you. We'd like to re-license the QuTiP notebooks to BSD and it would be extremely helpful to have your permission to re-license your respective contributions.
You can do so by writing something like "I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license." as a comment in this issue.
The issue description contains more details on why we'd like to make this change.
Thank your for reading and please let me know if you have any questions.
I agree to have my contributions to the qutip-notebooks released under the BSD license.
I agree to have my contributions to qutip-notebooks relicensed under BSD.
Thank you everyone for making this an amazingly quick and painless re-licensing process! Enjoy the BSD licensed notebooks. :D