Re: [h5md-user] Licence of H5MD

[Pierre de Buyl]

Hi Konrad,

The idea behind our choice, if I remember well, was that "GPL protects the
original project" in some way. I am not an expert on licenses, but I licensed
pyh5md as BSD (so that people can use it, no strings attached) but having H5MD
itself licensed as GPL prevents the release of a different H5MD from a
proprietary vendor (without concurrent release of their potentially altered H5MD
spec).

This is mostly theoretical because I doubt that there are commercial products
that would use H5MD and nothing would prevent, for instance, the use of
non-documented modules.

Also, the GPL only applies to the specification, not to related code.

Peter, Felix, comments welcome :-)

P

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:16:09PM +0200, Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> I noticed that the H5MD specification puts itself under the GPL3.
> The GPL is designed for software, whereas documents for human
> consumptions are normally placed under one of the CC licences.
> 
> I am not a lawyer and I don't really care about such stuff, but I
> wonder if the GPL was chosen for some good reason.
> 
> Konrad.
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> Konrad Hinsen
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