On Fri, Mar 17, 2017, Jason Swails wrote:
> So the issue here is that by licensing libsander as LGPL, we violate the
> terms of PBSA's GPL license.
I'd like to ask Jason to help us out of this mess, if he is willing. In the
statement just above, one could replace "PBSA" with "fftw", and illustrate a
similar problem. (In fact, fftw is really at the root of most of our
problems, since we can modify the PBSA license.)
High-level view: we could change the licenses of anything we have written.
But we also need to be able to create create a GPL code that is allowed
to link to fftw libraries, and at the same time have a sander API and
libsander that non-GPL codes can link to. So it seems like "sander" and
"libsander" have to have different licenses.
Questions:
1. Is there a technical reason why libpbsa and libfftw3 need to be included
into the Makefile target for libsander? (Stated another way: how hard
would it be to eliminate these?) I think the sander API does not expose
either pbsa or rism functionality, yet the symbols for pbsa and fftw are
included in libsander, and I'm wondering if that can be changed.
2. Can we separate things in order to be able to make a license
distinction: libsander (and its corresponding source code) could be LGPL,
whereas the sander (as a whole) would be GPL? Alternative: go back
to the old days, where we had separate sander.RISM (would be GPL) and
and sander (would be LGPL) builds.
We don't necessarily need to get this done for the AmberTools17 release, but
should be trying in good faith to make any required changes. Weaning
ourselves from fftw might be a long-term goal, but would be far from easy.
Above are just ideas....suggestions are welcome.....dac
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Received on Sat Mar 18 2017 - 12:00:03 PDT
