yaq/licensing

We (Kyle Sunden & Blaise Thompson) are committed to the advancement of the scientific enterprise. We believe that open sourcing scientific software is an important piece of the broader project to make science more egalitarian, reproducible, and of higher quality. This page details our thoughts regarding licensing in the yaq ecosystem.

Due to the "distributed development" approach of the yaq project, the yaq ecosystem is made up of many tiny pieces of software. Each of these has its own license. The comments here are general, and do not directly replace or supplement the license of any particular package. This document does not represent legally binding license terms, each project has a LICENSE file with the legal binding terms.

We have chosen to license our contributions under the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3.0 (LGPL-3.0). This license allows anyone to copy, distribute, or modify yaq packages. This license also specifies that any derivative works must be made freely available under the same license.

For the purposes of yaq, derivative works are direct modifications and redistribution of existing packages. For example, someone who modifies and redistributes yaqd-core-python must license their modifications under LGPL. This ensures that everyone in the community benefits from each-other's efforts to improve yaq.

Within the yaq ecosystem, mere usage of an existing package does not count as a derivative work. For example, a daemon which relies on yaqd-core-python can have any license, including closed licenses. Clients which interface with LGPL licensed daemons may also have any license. Usage of the yaq protocol implies absolutely no licensing obligation.

We encourage our fellow instrumentation developers to use open source licenses such as LGPL or MIT whenever possible. At the same time, we recognize the practicalities of licensing and do not wish to block those who would develop yaq-protocol-compliant closed source software.