Writing PNG with pure Python

[Steve Holden]

Paul Boddie wrote:
> Johann C. Rocholl wrote:
> 
>>The MIT license is enticingly short and simple, thank you for the tip.
>>
>>I have now decided to license my project (including the pure python PNG
>>library) under the Apache License 2.0 which is less restrictive than
>>the GPL in terms of sublicensing.
> 
> 
> But it is also incompatible with the GPL:
> 
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
> 
> It's obviously your decision about how you license your own code, but
> I'd advise you to disregard the "Pythonic license" rhetoric, whatever
> that means: Python's original licence was regarded as not being enough
> of a licence by some lawyers (that's what some people refer to as the
> original Python licence); subsequent licences aren't recommended for
> application to any other works (like various licences of the Python
> code over the years); despite advocacy for permissive licences by some
> parties, there exist numerous successful GPL'd and LGPL'd Python
> projects (meaning that projects licensed in such a way are not lesser
> members of the community). Moreover, any licensing gymnastics
> undertaken by the PSF did involve various extra somersaults to remain
> GPL-compatible, meaning that even people who favour permissive licences
> regard "licence interoperability" positively.
> 
> If you're convinced that a permissive licence suits your code best,
> please consider something whose side-effects you understand. If the
> additional patent grant or licence termination clauses (which the FSF
> don't regard as a bad thing, just something incompatible with the
> current GPL/LGPL) are specifically what you want, then the Apache
> Licence may be what you're after; otherwise, you should choose
> something less baroque and better understood, perhaps from this list:
> 
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
> 
> Yes, one of the best places to find out about non-FSF licences is
> actually the FSF themselves, undermining various myths some people like
> to put forward.
> 
Also remember that it's perfectly possible to release the same code 
under several different licenses. This can happen, for example, with 
contributions to Python. The PSF doesn't care how you license it to 
anyone else, only that you license it to the PSF under the Free Academic 
Licence or v2 of the Apache License. We then re-license it to Python 
users (under the Python license, naturally).

If the contributor then wants to license the same code under the GPL to 
other people there's no problem with that.

regards
  Steve
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