More permissive license?

[Shard]

Hi,

I just want to first off say thanks for making such a nice library, I played around with it a bit and It's definitely I want to use. Unfortunately due to the GPL license it seems that including within our codebase at work will effectively cause us to be violation of the GPL unless we open source our codebase. Considering we are a tech startup, this isn't an option.

I don't have any issues contributing any changes changes back to open source which LGPL enforces but forcing to open source our code base is a deal breaker for us.

[mjaschen]

Hi @Shard,

personally, I'm preferring a MIT-style license.

Unfortunately we can't change the license at this moment, because the algorithm for calculating the “perpendicular distance“ is borrowed from a GPL-licensed library.

A license change would be possible, if we implement the perpendicular distance algorithm from scratch (or using another library with a permissive license).

[TheCelavi]

@mjaschen I don't think that you have to use GPL license here. First, GPL license is applied to library, which is not used nor redistributed with this library.

You have ported the algorithm from Java to PHP. But that algorithm is not intellectual property of author - it is a well known mathematical formula (a common good) written in Java.

In general -> if I wrote a function sum($a, $b) which sums up two numbers, and I publish it under GPL license, and if you have same/similar library within your library, I don't think that you have to publish it under GPL as well.

Intellectual value is in fundamental concept of adding two numbers, not in code representation of it. And since no one has a copyright claim on adding two numbers (sum operation) -> you can use it freely.

I think that same applies to this function as well.

[mrieck]

Yeah porting an algorithm doesn't mean you need to use the same exact license. Oh well - I just switched to this library:
https://github.com/alexpechkarev/geometry-library

What's ironic is that that library copies Google's code function-for-function in PHP, which is ripping off Google way more than what this library does... but because he made his code MIT I have to go with that. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[mjaschen]

Hi,

phpgeo is MIT licensed starting with today's 2.0 release!