kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

To implement some NURBS functionality in the IGES framework I have used
the SINTEF SISL library (https://www.sintef.no/projectweb/geometry-toolkits/
).

The library license is GNU Affero v3; I asked for some clarification on the
licensing terms ('non-commercial' clause) and received a reply that it is
OK to use the library in KiCad since it is free software even if it is used
for commercial design and that the primary intention of the license is
to restrict use of the SISL library in cloud services (that use case would
require different licensing from SINTEF).

The only really tricky part comes from the 'v3' bit - according to the FSF
the AGPLv3 is not compatible with GPL2, and not even compatible with
GPLv3 but OK to mix with GPLv3 (whatever that means - I can already
hear some lawyers laughing).

Any thoughts on eventually having SISL as a dependency? What's the
current status of licensing of KiCad source modules? I can remove
the SISL dependency but this will cripple the IGES code by removing
the ability to check the validity of some structures within an input file.

- Cirilo