Licence change

[rs028]

We should consider whether EUPL is the most appropriate licence for Mistra.

As I understand it, the EUPL was developed by the EU to cover the work of the commission and potentially of other EU funded projects. While nothing prevents its adoption by other projects, it seems an odd choice for Mistra for the following reasons:

1. Mistra is scientific software and, by definition, science is international. Therefore it is irrelevant whether the licence is fully compatible with EU law or translated into all the EU languages.

2. Most of the development of Mistra was not EU funded. Only a fraction of the work by @JosueBock that created the current version was funded by the EU, before they pulled the plug. The rest was done on a voluntary basis.

3. Most of the users and developers - past and present - of Mistra are, or soon will be, outside the EU. This is not particularly important per se, it just means an EU centered licence is not relevant.

I think Mistra should be under a licence with global applicability and widely known/understood all over the world, especially within the scientific community. Personally, I think that it would be more appropriate to use either the GPL licence or, if we want to be more permissive, the MIT or BSD licence (see this website https://tldrlegal.com/ for more info).

There has never really been a discussion about this. I think we need to discuss it now and decide before the paper is ready to be published. Any thoughts/opinions @pb866, @JosueBock, @cereevesUEA?

[rs028]

Note: conversion to GPL2 is allowed by EUPL. This is also the licence of KPP.

[JosueBock]

There has never really been a discussion about this.

There has been a thorough discussion about this, with Andreas Bott, Jan Kaiser, Claire Reeves, and two people from UEA who are specialists about licences.

Unless there is a precise situation where the EUPL licence would be an issue, I see no reason to discuss this point at the moment.

[rs028]

I think the discussion should have involved some of the developers, besides you and Andreas.
Anyways, can you share the reason(s) behind this choice?