On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Zachary Pincus <zachary.pincus@yale.edu> wrote:
Also, is anyone a license-maven? Is this sort of thing (distributing binaries, then downloading and run-time loading them in a BSD-licensced project) OK under the GPL (v2) or the FreeImage license? http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/license.html
Meh, licensing :) My take (and these issues are tricky, so IANAL and all that): The combined work (skimage + freeimage) must be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Our license (the Modified BSD) is more permissive than the GPL, so the GPL simply imposes some additional restrictions. As far as I understand, you are within your rights to distribute patches to GPL code under any license you wish (which is, in a tenuous sense, what we're doing). When we distribute skimage + the freeimage plugin (but no freeimage binary), our distribution is only governed by the permissive BSD. E.g., a company may use our code with the Matlotlib backend, mix it in with their own (proprietary) code, and not have to worry about anything. If we write the "install_libs" command, we may want to clearly state what the implications are. Also, an interesting perspective on incorporating BSD code into GPL projects: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html Stéfan