fenics team mailing list archive

["tomtzigt" <tomtzigt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All:

 

  On the plane trip back home I was thinking about the GPL and LGPL
question. One thought that I think captures the best of both worlds is if
the framework is GPL but it defines pluggable interfaces that could be LGPL
components. The overall framework would still be driven by the nature and
intent of the GPL and GPL-based implementations of these pluggable
interfaces provide a complete GPL based sw stack. However, an organization
that can't deal with the GPL license because they might have some legacy
code, or secret sauce they can't part with, could wrap that asset in an LGPL
pluggable that still would enhance the overall FEniCS project without
forcing everything to be GPL. This addresses the concern that the overall
project remains open and sharable among all, but decouples those
organizations that have valuable assets sufficiently so that they can
contribute either in terms of a valuable integration or as a distributable
bundle without having to part with their asset. 

 

This decoupling would allow academic clients to work with industry and
leverage FEniCS in their interactions with proprietary sw. As an example, an
academic group could work with Shell using FEniCS, with Shell providing some
secret sauce they don't want to make public. All the work that the academic
group would do would fall on the GPL side so that Shell can't turn around
and claim they own it, while at the same time Shell can still leverage its
internal resources to ease the pain of something new.

 

Theo