[ccan] licensing

[Brad Hards]

Disclosure: I don't speak for the CCAN project, and my contributions are all 
trivial. Only personal opinion follows:

On Sat, 31 May 2014 11:33:59 PM Sam Watkins wrote:
> Most CPAN modules are availabe under a liberal "Artistic" license, which
> is not copyleft.  CPAN and perl are successful because we can use most
> any CPAN module in any commercial or open-source project.
I am not sure that necessarily follows.
 
> As you know, that is not the case with GPL licensed libraries.  They
> cannot be used with a proprietary licensed product, and they cannot be
> used with an open-source project if the license is not GPL-compatible.
This may (or may not) be the intent of the authors. Not everyone is interested 
in promoting proprietary code.

> Is there any chance you'd consider shifting all of CCAN
> to be at least as liberal as the LGPL?
 
> My preference for licensing is public domain / CC0, MIT, BSD, LGPL in
> that order.  LGPL is harmful but tolerable.  Viral copyleft like the GPL
> is no good for a library of reusable code.
I don't see CCAN as a library in the LGPL sense. 

> I've been on this list for a long time, watching progess with interest,
> but I have never used CCAN, nor contributed anything, because you appear
> to be using the GPL by preference.
I think that myth was already debunked by another poster, and the irony of 
posting this as a follow-up to a nice contribution by David Gibson that was 
BSD-MIT may have been lost along the way...

Some of CCAN was extracted from Samba, which has good reasons for wanting to 
be GPL, so those parts of CCAN are derived works. 

There have been reasonable requests to change licenses in the past. Not many 
of those say "make it public domain so I can sell your work in my proprietary 
application and not give anything back" though, so you might want to think 
about your phrasing.

Brad