[Bigbang-dev] Licensing and private sector use

[Nick Doty]

I’d be fine with a BSD or MIT license. As we’ve discussed in the past, some lawyers at UC Berkeley would actually prefer for our contributions as employed graduate student researchers to be under one of those licenses rather than GPL v3 because of some (in my opinion, confused) interpretations about patent commitments. But I haven’t concluded that that was a blocking issue.

https://github.com/datactive/bigbang/issues/74 <https://github.com/datactive/bigbang/issues/74>

I’m not sure what it would take to change the license, or to dual license, given the number of past contributors.

I think the past reasoning about making licensing decisions to ensure open access to development and encourage educational use remains sound. However, I think BSD or MIT licensing could be compatible with that reasoning, especially if it enabled private companies to use and contribute.

Cheers,
Nick

> On Jan 4, 2019, at 4:52 AM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am now tentatively planning to work in the private sector starting this summer.
> 
> I wanted to take the opportunity now to raise questions about the future of the project.
> 
> A practical reality is this: while some time ago we gave BigBang an Affero-GPL license in order to save it from corruption by private interests, in all likelihood that move would prevent me from working much on BigBang from within a private company.
> 
> Currently, for my consulting work on topics like BigBang, I have settled this by using/building parallel tools. That redundancy was not super efficient, but preserved certain political interests. I have been able to work on BigBang on "academic time".
> 
> I see ways I could potentially work with and contribute to BigBang in what I anticipate to be my next role, *if* the license changed to be more "business friendly" (MIT License, for example).
> 
> I don't feel comfortable making a call to change license myself, as I am facing a rather personal change in priorities that I don't expect others to follow. It is what it is, and I wanted to alert the community about it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Seb

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