Should MPI.jl's license be changed?

[eschnett]

MPI.jl uses the "Unlicense" as license. Do we want to change that to something more mainstream?

[simonbyrne]

@lcw I believe this was due to you: do you have any particular preferences now?

I would be pro-MIT license: as far as I know, the main difference is the acknowledgement requirement.

[lcw]

If there is a good reason I would be open to change however I would prefer to keep the code in the public domain. I don't know much about the different licenses. What do people think about using CC0?

[eschnett]

"One important reason why Creative Commons licenses should not be used to release software is that they aren’t compatible with existing free software licenses, [...]" https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-domain-software/.

On the other hand, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses says "If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0. CC0 also provides a public domain dedication with a fallback license, and is more thorough and mature than the Unlicense."

[lcw]

"One important reason why Creative Commons licenses should not be used to release software is that they aren’t compatible with existing free software licenses, [...]" https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-domain-software/.

I think they say this for their Creative Commons licenses. It seems to me, they do not consider CC0 a license but instead a public domain dedication https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/.

[giordano]

Unless I'm missing it, CC0 isn't OSI-approved (and General requires OSI-approved licenses): https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

[brenhinkeller]

To be fair, CC0 is the one cc thing (I would say license except that it's not, just a public domain dedication) that's often considered acceptable for software. I don't know if OSI has considered it, but FSF added it to their list https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-domain-software/

[brenhinkeller]

Oh, also it looks like the Unlicense already is on the OSI approved list: https://opensource.org/licenses/unlicense so this is all already compliant from that perspective.