Re: License Question

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Jamie Specter <jamie.specter@gmail.com> wrote:
> Great find, Daniele!  That appears to be true for GPLv3 but not LGPLv3 which
> is included on the Category X list.  (Have to love how complex licenses can
> get!)
>
> From the Apache FAQs:
>
> Apache takes a strong approach against distributing any components under
> prohibited licenses (i.e. Category X), which includes LGPL.  Therefore, we
> cannot even use LGPL licenses open source in the project.  This appears to
> be regardless of linking.

Using a Python module doesn't constitute linking in the LGPL sense
(IANAL, but read it often). So, in order to understand what we are
talking about: what is that your project does?

- It uses psycopg?
- It modifies psycopg?
- It redistributes psycopg?

In the first case, to the best of my knowledge, and with the hundreds
of proprietary or variously licensed projects which use psycopg, you
can just use psycopg, which is a library and doesn't enforce a license
on the programs using it.

In the second case, we do want whatever improvement you made to
psycopg to be available to any other psycopg user, thank you very much
for them, and the LGPL is a great license to enforce that.

All the above, furthermore, is about distribution, i.e. dumping the
psycopg source code into a directory of your program and shipping it
with the rest. Is that what you want? Because if a line in
`requirements.txt` is fine (pretty much the industry standard), or a
git submodule is fine, you can use that, which results in the user
going there on github or PyPI and downloading his psycopg copy and we
are all happy.

You can also consider changing your license to GPL, why not?

I'm just speaking for myself, however, not knowing what is your
project, not knowing why it supposedly need a change in psycopg
license, which has survived almost 20 years of multinationals lawyers
nitpicking on it, is not so much of an incentive to do so.


-- Daniele