[gmx-developers] Mixed license post 5.0

[Erik Lindahl]

Hi,

Just to confirm what Roland said: We deliberately chose LGPLv2.1 (or later) since it’s the most liberal of all these licenses. Anybody is more than welcome to link to other code that is GPLv2/3, in which case the resulting binary will have that license.

However, personally I will vote against accepting patches into the main Gromacs codebase that rely on large external libraries that are are not compatlble with LGPLv2 since that will just cause further fractioning and large parts of the source code that are not tested by default. Such things are better distributed as separate programs, IMHO.

Cheers,

Erik


On 06 Feb 2014, at 23:18, Roland Schulz <roland at utk.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I don't think you need to do anything special if you want to add Openbabel as an optional dependency. We already have a GPL optional dependency: FFTW. This doesn't effect the source of Gromacs or gmx binaries without the optional feature enabled are licensed under LGPL. If you compile Gromacs with the GPL version of FFTW (=you don't own a commercial FFTW license) and then distribute (remember the GPL clause only triggers when you distribute - what you do without distributing doesn't matter) the resulting binary with the FFTW included then this derived work is licensed automatically under GPL. I think if you distribute Gromacs compiled against FFTW but without including the FFTW shared libraries, then I think it doesn't qualify as derived work, and thus the binary still would be LGPL and not automatically GPL.
> 
> Roland
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 3:58 PM, David van der Spoel <spoel at xray.bmc.uu.se> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm considering the following option:
> 
> what if gromacs would sport a second binary apart from "gmx" that would
> be licensed under the GPLv2 license and hence be able to link to other
> GPL libraries?
> 
> The advantage would be that we can e.g. link to openbabel, and in this
> manner read in gaussian files (I have for instance a tool that creates a
> GAFF topology for small molecules from gaussian files). Linux
> distributors could distribute the package without problems as far as I see.
> 
> Any drawbacks?
> 
> --
> David van der Spoel, Ph.D., Professor of Biology
> Dept. of Cell & Molec. Biol., Uppsala University.
> Box 596, 75124 Uppsala, Sweden. Phone:  +46184714205.
> spoel at xray.bmc.uu.se    http://folding.bmc.uu.se
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