License issues

[FrancescAlted]

I am the author of the Blosc compression library (http://blosc.org), and I have just seen your work on bitshuffle, which I find pretty nice. I might be interested in including your code in Blosc, but bitshuffling choosing GPL chokes with MIT used in Blosc.

Would you like to change bitshuffling license so that parts of your code could be easily included in other MIT/BSD projects?

Thanks!

[kiyo-masui]

I will absolutely look in into changing the license.

Very happy that you are interested.

Kiyo
On Aug 28, 2014 3:47 AM, "FrancescAlted" notifications@github.com wrote:

I am the author of the Blosc compression library (http://blosc.org), and
I have just seen your work on bitshuffle, which I find pretty nice. I might
be interested in including your code in Blosc, but bitshuffling choosing
GPL chokes with MIT used in Blosc.

Would you like to change bitshuffling license so that parts of your code
could be easily included in other MIT/BSD projects?

Thanks!

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#9.

[FrancescAlted]

Thanks for considering this.

[kiyo-masui]

Would the LGPL work for you? My understanding is that this would allow you to: 1. distribute verbatim copies of Bitshuffle (or parts thereof) with Blosc, and 2. compile them into a single binary, all without affecting the Blosc licensing. It would require that any changes made to Bitshuffle be released under the LGPL, which would most practically be done by making the changes upstream.

[FrancescAlted]

I am afraid LGPL would be undesirable for my purposes. This has been discussed many times in the numpy/scipy mailing lists, and the outcome was that, for including external code, they require non-LGPL licenses:

http://wiki.scipy.org/License_Compatibility

Blosc is meant to be part of the numpy/scipy ecosystem, so I would prefer a license in the style of MIT/BSD, as stated above. Would that be possible? Thanks.

[kiyo-masui]

Addressed in version in pull request #10 and release 0.1.3.

[FrancescAlted]

Excellent. Thank you!

BTW, the c-blosc project, despite being a general library, also provides an HDF5 interface, so feel free to send PRs there in case you are interested.

[FrancescAlted]

It took a while, but a preliminary backport of the bitshuffle to c-blosc is here: Blosc/c-blosc#146

Thanks again!

[kiyo-masui]

This looks great. Hopefully your users find it useful.

Kiyo

[FrancescAlted]

The port is completed now (with runtime detection for AVX2, so that you can run AVX2-enhanced binaries on non AVX2 machines) and merged in master. There are still some loosing ends, but should be eventually addressed in the future.

And I am definitely sure that there will be users that will find this very useful :)