Consider switching to a more permissive software license

[jodal]

pafy is licensed under GPLv3. This makes it unusable for projects with a more permissive license, like the Apache Licence, MIT or BSD, without them changing their own license to GPLv3 too.

Of course, the choice of license entirely up to you as the author of the software, but I'd like you to at least consider switching to a more permissive license so pafy can be used as a building block by more projects. :-)

[np1]

That's fine with me. MIT it is. Thanks for the suggestion.

[jodal]

Thanks :-)

[np1]

I may have been too hasty to switch to the MIT license and will need to consider more which license to use, back to GPLv3 for now.

[np1]

Ok, I have looked into it a bit more and from what I understand the more "permissive" licenses are permissive in that they permit others to be less permissive, so I decided to stick with GPLv3.

[ktws]

Wouldn't using LGPL be a good compromise? This would allow Apache Licence, MIT or BSD licenced python scripts to dynamically import Pafy.

As I understand it, under LGPL, any 3rd party modifications to the Pafy library its-self would still need to be released to the public under LGPL. Lifting sections of the pafy library code and using it in another script would mean that that script would need to be released under GPL. It's what videolan's libVLC python library is now released under.

[np1]

Yes possibly, I will consider it and get back to you.

[ids1024]

To change software license, you need permission from all copyright holders. In this case, it would be anyone who contributed code to the project, unless their contribution was a trivial change, such as a single line.

It looks like there are a couple contributors whose changes are non-trivial.

[np1]

@ids1024 thanks for making me aware of this, in that case I will contact the other contributors if I decide I wish to switch and seek their approval.

[np1]

@kewitz @ElegantMonkey @stav @Dav1dde
Thank you for contributing code to this project while it was released under GNU Public License v3. Do you consent to changing the license to GNU Lesser General Public License v3?

[Dav1dde]

Yes, the change would be great!

[stav]

Yes, sounds like a good idea for the lesser.

[kewitz]

Sure, whatever you decide is good for me.

[ekisu]

Yes, that's alright.

[np1]

Great, thank you all for your approval 👍
I have changed the license.