[Dune] license again

[Andreas Lauser]

Hi Gregor,

As the person responsible much of for said licensing discussion, let me try to 
clarify a few things:

- Regardless of which license you choose, you are still the copyright holder 
of your own code, i.e. you may re-license your own code however you like. 
(e.g., you may grant your colleagues a different license than the rest of the 
world in a year's time)
- If you ship a modified DUNE file with your code, and want to be on the save 
side until the Dune project defines what exactly the term "DUNE source file" 
means in their template exception, you should make your own code available 
under a license that is compatible with the GPL version 2. Besides using the 
GPLv2 directly, this means that permissive licenses like MIT and BSD 
unproblematic. Note though, that -- somewhat ironically -- it is problematic 
to only allow the GPL version 3 because it is incompatible with DUNE's GPLv2.
- Even if you decide to use a license which is not compatible with the GPLv2, 
it is undoubtedly allowed to ship a patch for the DUNE file with your source 
code and apply it during the build process. Be aware, though, that in this 
case the the resulting binaries cannot be legally distributed and the GPLv2 
will possibly apply to the patch itself.

tl;dr: If you want to use a copyleft license, use the GPLv2 or GPLv2+; if your 
colleagues do not like copyleft, a permissive license like MIT, BSD or Apache 
is probably your best option.

cheers
  Andreas

On Friday, 27 November 2020 19:25:57 CET Gregor Corbin wrote:
> Dear Dune Community,
> 
> as part of my Ph.D. I wrote some code based on DUNE and DUNE PDELab,
> which I now want make accessible for everyone. I sent everything (the
> research code, auxiliary scripts, outputs) to the university library to
> put it on one of their servers.
> They asked me under which license I want to publish it. My first
> instinct was to choose a relatively strict open source license, such as
> GPL. But I have really no clue about the fine details and implications.
> The person from the library told me that using the GPL could mean that
> colleagues from my work group could not re-use my code for their
> research/publications. This seems a bit far fetched for me, as there is
> apparently also no problem for me to publish results obtained with code
> based on the Dune libraries.
> 
> So, are there any downsides of using the GPL?
> 
> To complicate matters, I included a small patch (as a git diff) to
> dune-geometry (The original dune modules are not a part of the published
> package. I only have a script to clone them from their repositories).
> Does this mean I have to use the GPL anyway? I am aware that there was a
> discussion about licenses to modified dune code recently, but this is
> still unclear to me.
> 
> I would be grateful for any advice in this.
> 
> Cheers,
> Gregor Corbin
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Dune at lists.dune-project.org
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-- 
Writing non-trivial software that is correct (for any meaningful definition of
correct) is beyond the current capabilities of the human species.
  -- Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
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