Just wanted to reiterate, and document the reasons why, nanomsg will not
ever change its license.
First off, it would be impossible to change the license without getting
every contributor’s agreement (or rewriting the contributions). This
mostly (by far) means Martin, but a number of other people would have to
buy in.
Second, we need to preserve intent - the current license is permissive and
simple (MIT or Expat, depending on which licensing site you look at - the
text is the same). This allows all kinds of uses, and only requires
copyright notices be preserved.
I did briefly look at Apache 2, with an idea to propose to contributors to
change, since that is mostly the same permissive conditions, but adds some
patent protections which might help folks feel safer when using
libnanomsg. I like the Apache 2 license, and would normally use it in
circumstances like libnanomsg. (I use it for mangos for example.)
HOWEVER, it turns out that Apache 2 is *incompatible* with GPLv2, which
means that any relicense would potentially make many useful combinations of
software involving libnanomsg illegal. So as much as the patent protection
clause would be useful, I think breaking GPLv2 is worse.
No other free licenses offer any benefits beyond what we have today with
the Expat license.
Hence, I cannot see any circumstance where the libnanomsg license would
change.
Hopefully that clears things up.
- Garrett
