[AstroPy] API question: Instantiating of time/coord and similar

[James Turner]

> No-one has ever asked us about AST's license. It was a triumph to
> allow it to be shipped with GPL when it first came out (and that was
> mainly driven by Mark Calabretta's wcslib being GPL). We can
> definitely try to work out how to get it changed to a looser license
> (the main issue being to find out which person you have to talk to and
> whether they even care) but I assume wcslib would have to change with
> it.

Thanks for the info. If it were available under a BSD licence or
similar, that would make things easy :-). I had assumed the GPL
copyleft was a deliberate restriction because, for example, SLALIB
was available at one time under terms that effectively seemed to be
tightened by JAC moving Starlink to GPL (sorry if that's not quite
an accurate statement but it's how I ended up using the version
distributed with IRAF instead of the latest one).

I actually quite like the GPL -- it just becomes a pain when some
project that matters to you decides not to use it for one reason or
another.

I believe WCSLIB was changed quite recently (maybe a couple of years
ago) to LGPL, so I think that should be a non-issue now.

Cheers,

James.