Consider switching to GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) license

[EwoutH]

Currently the pysheds project is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). This license requires that every project which uses it as a dependency, has to have a GPL-3.0 license as well. So each open source project that uses import pysheds must use GPL-3.0 license, even when never touching or modifying the pysheds source code.

Therefor I would like to ask to consider switching to GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 (LGPL-3.0). This license is specifically developed for this purpose, it still requires any modifications of the source code to be shared and requires commercial products which use it to be licensed under the same LGPL, but it allows projects which only link to it to have a more permissive license. So that allows other open source project to keep using their BSD-3 or MIT licenses when importing pysheds.

[mdbartos]

Thanks for this. What is the standard practice for changing the license of an existing repo? Is it typical to just create a new version number with a new license? Can you link an example?

Thanks, MDB

[EwoutH]

Thanks for getting back so quickly!

As soon as you update the license file, from that moment onwards all current code falls under the new license, as well as new commits and releases.

[groutr]

@mdbartos Releasing a new version for the license change is one method. You can only do this if you are the sole author of the code. If there are other contributors, you would need to get the consent of all other contributors to relicense the code from GPL to a less-permissive license (like LGPL).

A couple of projects I've worked with in the past have CLAs (contributor licensing agreements) in which the contributor grants permission for the project going forward to use, modify, or relicense any accepted contributions. Python Software Foundation and Anaconda both use such agreements.