CAS Open Source Software

The comments are gone, when deleting the blog. Blog comments are automatically saved in forum.

Ops, the comment shows under this blog again. Anyway, nice blog. Avi. But let me change the star level again. Interesting, the star level is averaged. Let me change it again.

Growing pains :)

Thanks for all your work, Hai, this is certainly looking better!

Excellent summary, Avi! I was not aware of that difference between the GPL and LGPL.

I honed in on this paragraph:

• If we wanted to be as permissive as possible (allow someone to use our work to make money for his or her company, use our work to build proprietary software for sale, etc.) then we need to focus on licenses like the new BSD, the Boost, the ISC, the MIT, etc. which are pretty much along the lines "Use this for whatever you want at your own risk."

My personal opinion is that the product of a research organization like the CAS should be as free-for-use as the "discovery" that f(x) = (x-2)(x+3) has two roots. I vote for whatever license allows us to "Use this for whatever you want at your own risk."

That being said, isn't it true that GPL code can be plagiarized, i.e., re-typed into one's own code?

Thanks Avi, good summary. To back up a level, the choice of a license could be made, I suppose, at the committee level or at the individual contributor or product level. It's called the "Open Source Committee", so it's probably not controversial for us to plug some kind of open source license at the committee level.

On the other hand, it may not be necessary for the committee to encourage particular FLOSS licenses in advance. Often there are strong tactical reasons for some open source work to be in a particular license. For instance, both R and the ChainLadder package are GPL'd, so any code submitted to these should be GPL'd also; the stan MCMC libraries are BSD3'd so contributions to those should be BSD3'd. Conversely, if you use ChainLadder package code in your project, then the GPL copyleft would probably attach to your code, basically requiring that you use GPL also. The free software foundation has a somewhat nuanced view about which license to choose, even though they are strong GPL/AGPL advocates.

Somewhat unrelated to this point, but perhaps worth mentioning, is that a project can be dual or even triple licensed, and this sometimes makes sense. So a new project could be BSD'd and GPLv2 at the same time, partially ameliorating that incompatibility.