I recently announced that Parthenon is now open source under the GPLv3  license for the main library and the MIT license for the skeleton application.

Some misconceptions about GPL infectiousness

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2024-04-25 10:00:08

I recently announced that Parthenon is now open source under the GPLv3 license for the main library and the MIT license for the skeleton application. And there was some feedback that I should use LGPL instead since the skeleton app is MIT so people can redistribute it and relicense it. I chose GPL because it was the most restrictive popular open-source library. While I want people to relicense their business logic in any way they want, I don't want them to be able to relicense Parthenon to anything other than GPL-compatible licenses.

Firstly, I'm not a lawyer therefore what I say should not be taken as legal advice or anything similar. And if a lawyer comes along and says I'm wrong about things I'll be willing to change things. But I'm not going to change my mind when fellow armchair lawyers say I'm wrong without proof.

I think that LGPL was created to solve problems in compiled languages and not interpreted languages. LGPL is about allowing standalone executables to use dynamically linked libraries and only having GPL apply to the library and not the executable. There is no executable with an interpreted language.

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