fenics team mailing list archive

[Harish Narayanan <harish.mlists@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear FEniCS enthusiasts,

I am going to reiterate a concern that I tried to bring up earlier
regarding the copyright consent forms. Please chime in with your views.

I understand the rationale behind using LGPL for core FEniCS components
(e.g. DOLFIN and FFC). It makes sense to me that these projects could
form a part of future (potentially proprietary) applications. The
developers of such applications clearly have to bring in a lot of
domain-specific knowledge. I can see why they might want to keep such
knowledge proprietary, and I can see how moving to LGPL brings them into
the community at least as users of FEniCS.

But the same logic doesn't hold (in my mind) for FEniCS Apps. Some of
these function reasonably well and are already capable of solving select
domain-specific problems. Aren't they, in a sense, closer to complete,
immediately useful applications? Given this, does it make sense that
they too should be released under LGPL? What is then to prevent someone
from, say, slapping a GUI on a well-functioning solver and selling it as
a tool?

Harish