[alberto]

The fundamental question in this is: can you re-base FOAM 2.3.2 on LGPL? There is about 65% (rough count with a search) of code written by Henry and others in that package.

It looks more complicated than before to me, and two licenses for one software are messy, not easier.

Best,

[alberto]

Originally Posted by l_r_mcglashan

Also, how do you change a GPL to a LGPL? I imagine there are a lot of issues with that.

There is no difficulty in re-licensing if you are the owner of the copyright, or if you have (written) consent from all the contributors. There are very famous examples of re-licensing (see Qt, for example). Once you have the agreement of all contributors, you make another release (you cannot change license to a released code under GPL).

Best,

[gschaider]

Just wanted to add my 2cents worth (Eurocents!) to the discussion: for myself a change of license wouldn't make much difference. The point where LGPL could make a difference is not by changing the license for the whole OF but just putting a PART (basically $FOAM_SRC/OpenFOAM) under LGPL. That could make it easier for pre- and postprocessor-vendors to write OF-meshes and read OF-data without having to reverse engineer those parts (the conversion to and from their data-structures would happen in memory). Not that I know of any concrete cases where that would apply.

Bernhard

[philippose]

Hello and a Good Evening to everyone,

I do not want to get deep into this topic because of my extreme lack of experience in the legal issues of licensing, but I could not help posting a couple of doubts and questions that popped up while reading the posts...:

1. Is there currently a large percentage (where, large could be weighted by number or importance) of OpenFOAM users who are being hindered by the current GPL licensing policy of OpenFOAM hence making this a move out of requirement rather than a pure "idea to be bounced about"?

2. The idea of mixing up / layering LGPL and GPL by licensing individual source folders / files or individual libraries differently seems to me like an invitation for confusion in the not so distant future.... Are there currently any successful Open-source projects with this kind of licensing policy?

3. Would the shift to LGPL affect the quality of the code in the future? Would it not allow more closed, unconnected groups of people to work on "features" and "extensions" without the constant peer-review and testing which GPL code gets? Eventually probably resulting in compromising the effective quality of the overall OpenFOAM project depending on how wide-spread these "non-optimal" versions become?

4. How would these thoughts on GPL vs LGPL reflect on topics such as Documentation, Release cycles, Community motivation, etc.?


Have a nice day ahead :-)!

Philippose

[nlc]

Hello everybody,

I would like to know what is the conclusion of this tread !

Is the process of changing OpenFOAM from GPL to partially LGPL started ??
Will it ??

Openfoam-extended is at version 1.6 but have a lot more functionality then 2.0 !!

Dose the extended project consider to make a fork of OpenFOAM ??

By the way I really like the idea of writhing contributor of the code in a list of author. Which sadly is not done in OpenFOAM 2.1.

best Regards
NLC