[Insight-developers] Linear algebra licensing and ITK 3.18 Release

[kent williams]

Not to belabor the point but you say 'your summary is correct' and yet you
state LGPL should can't be included, where as I said I thought that it could
be OK.  I don't care one way or another. I don't know of any LGPL code that
ITK needs or wants.

But I am interested in which LGPL restrictions are incompatible with the ITK
license.

It's really a global problem. Some people apply licenses to their code
without really understanding what they've done, or they fail to include any
license at all, which is just as dangerous.

Due to DMCA Copyright rules, EVERYTHING anyone creates is implicitly
copyrighted, so if someone wants to share code, they need to explicitly
state what rights they're willing to grant those who wish to use their code.

As for GPL, it reflects the absolutist political stance of Richard Stallman,
and like all absolutist opinions, it is by definition unreasonable. It's
like abstinence-only sex education: being unwilling to accomodate real world
conditions, it ends up sabotaging its own goals.

But that's probably not an arugment to get into here ;-)

On 3/22/10 11:36 AM, "Luis Ibanez" <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:

> Hi Kent,
> 
> 
> Your summary is correct.
> 
> 
> 1) Yes, ITK's BDS license has minimal conditions and it is one of the
>     most permissive licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative.
> 
> 2) Code covered by the GPL license can not be incorporated into ITK.
> 
> 3) Code covered by the LGPL license can not be incorporated into ITK.
> 
> 4) Yes, code incorporated into ITK must be under a BSD license or
>     under a license that has less restrictions than the BSD license.
>     The ACM license is very restrictive, therefore we must replace
>     any code in ITK that is subject to that license.
> 
> 5) Yes, in extremely useful cases we carry code that may facilitate
>     to interface to GPL and/or LGPL code. Such adaptor classes are
>     to be enabled by the user, via a CMake flag.  It is then up to the
>     users to deal with the consequences of their applications becoming
>     subject to the GPL license.
> 
> 
> 
>        Luis
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 11:34 AM, kent williams
> <norman-k-williams at uiowa.edu> wrote:
>> Correct me if I'm wrong but here's my executive overview of ITK licensing.
>> 
>> 1. ITK itself is released with a BSD-like license, meaning that it's truly
>> Free software, in that anyone can use it any way they want to --
>> incorporating it into both open- and closed-source applications.
>> 
>> 2. GPL has the 'viral hook' disadvantage, in that it forces anything
>> incorporating GPL-licensed software to also be GPL licensed.  This is
>> incompatible with ITK's license, so ITK doesn't incorporate GPL-licensed
>> software.
>> 
>> 3. The Lesser GPL (LGPL) license is GPL minus the 'viral hook.' GLIBC is
>> released under GPL; otherwise no closed-source program would be legal on
>> Linux, or OSX.  LGPL libraries could potentially be incorporated into ITK.
>> 
>> 4. Anything incorporated into ITK has to have an unambiguous software
>> license compatible with the ITK license.  Thus the current search to replace
>> the linear algebra stuff apparently under ACM license restrictions.
>> 
>> 5. In extraordinary cases, (FFTW being the prime example), ITK will include
>> classes that depend on GPL-licensed libraries, but without including the
>> library as part of ITK. It's up to the ITK user to resolve their own
>> licensing questions if they configure ITK to use these GPL-licensed
>> libraries.
>> 
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