Add a license!

[majdal]

This is somewhat complicated. GarlicSIM is published under LGPL2.1, which (if i understand correctly) allows us to use license our library under any license we wish, but not modify GarlicSIM.

[vchynarov]

Do we have to modify GarlicSIM though?

[majdal]

I think the plan was to modify it in order to allow it to save to a db, so
we can have persistency.

2013/12/5 Viktor Chynarov notifications@github.com

Do we have to modify GarlicSIM?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/23#issuecomment-29959325
.

[vchynarov]

Could we just write a wrapper around it? ie,

import garlic_db
import garlicsim
import x_simpack

results = garlicsim.listsimulate(x_simpack)
db_name = "db"
db_params = [...]
garlic_db.store(db_name, results, db_params)

So that GaricSIM isn't modified?

[majdal]

We will have to look more closely into this. @kousu, can you shed some light?

[kousu]

The LGPL says: you can use the library for any purpose, there's no warranty, and any changes you make to the library and then publish must be open source. That shouldn't be a problem at all for us. The difference between GPL and LGPL is that with the GPL, any software you write on top of a library must additionally be open-source.

Also: strange, github didn't email me this, nor did I notice it in the RSS feed I've been following. Maybe I should pay closer attention.

[kousu]

So, yes we could just wrap GarlicSIM and not have to open source that, but I think since we've already got all our code up on github that's a non-issue.

Plus, in the long run it is better for us (and for the scientific-simulation community at large) if we clean up whatever we do and merge it into mainline garlicsim, if it adds something valuable.

[vchynarov]

Can we close this issue? If for now we just do an arbitrary license and we don't have any changes to garlicsim anyway.

[kousu]

Because this project is part of several term projects and different levels of theses, we do need to be careful about this. I've been flippantly pouring my thoughts into the wiki here, but Majd and Fey are maintaining a separate Google Drive labeled SYDE468 and Hala has her .docs and .ppts on her laptop and the Games Institute people have already made textures for us but haven't noted their copyright terms and will probably make us some demo videos eventually (hmm. Do we need to choose a separate documentation license too, then?). What gets put in here can't come out again without policy 73 looming.

Let's ping everybody with the options (http://opensource.org/licenses/) and leave it open until our next meeting. I've left an empty LICENSE.text in the project root that we can fill in then.