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Wednesday, April 02, 2003

  11:18 AM
Back in December I sent my license for SHPTRANS to the Free Software Foundation to see whether it was GPL-compatible. I just got their reply yesterday: "While your formulation of condition 3 causes much less problems in practice than the original BSD license, it still demands the same kind of thing that made the original BSD license not GPL compatible." They couldn't give a definitive answer whether it would be GPL compatible or not. I was looking for a definitive "yes", because I do want to be certain that people can use my software in GPL'd works (as well as non-GPL'd works).

Two choices that I am considering to resolve this:
  1. Revise my license, making it GPL compatible. This is not too difficult. FSF was kind enough to provide a few tips.
  2. Drop my license, and replace it with dual AFL/GPL. I do like the AFL, except that it is not compatible with the GPL. Other than that, it covers all of the bases that I care about. If the AFL 1.2 had existed last summer, I think I would have done this for the initial open source release of SHPTRANS.
Either way, it means 1.1c (still on track to be released this weekend) will not have the same license as the prerelease.
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