License is too restrictive

[cao]

The current license, GPLv3, is too restrictive for widespread adoption.

A move to a less restrictive license, so that others can incorporate idalink more easily into proprietary software and then improve idalink naturally instead of being forced to GPL-license it or not use idalink at all might be a good idea. Under the current GPLv3 license, many of the companies that use IDA (which clearly is a requirement) might not be using idalink because they cannot easily distribute it as part of their own proprietary software. A too restrictive license can be cause for software not being adopted (carmaa/inception#105). We should preemptively improve on this situation.

I'd love to see idalink move to BSD (or MIT), or at least LGPL.

[zardus]

LGPL probably makes sense. I'm hesitant to go less restrictive -- if they want to use it, they can contribute back. I'll look into relicensing; I'm guessing just a change of the LICENSE file and an explanatory commit message should do it.

In general, the idea that this thing is going to get widespread adoption under any circumstances is rather wild :-)

[cao]

Wild ideas are awesome though!

My assumption is that it is going to get significant less attention under GPLv3 than it would under LGPL or BSD/MIT considering the problems that GPL (in particular v3) is bringing in terms of using it in proprietary software, company policies, licensing issues, lawyer fun, etc.

Regarding changing the license: confirmation from contributors (if their contribution is still part of the code) and then changing the license with an explicit commit should be enough.

[zachriggle]

+1 on changing the license to any of those mentioned (LGPL/BSD/MIT), the current license is preventing usage of Angr in commercial applications since Angr includes this code.

[zardus]

I have no objection to BSD as long as:

1. @zachriggle spells "Angr" in lowercase ("angr"), like it's supposed to be spelled!
2. @cao, @rhelmot, and @adrianherrera, as the other idalink contributors agree. I take it that cao, as the guy that opened this issue, agrees.

I'd also point out that angr includes VEX, which is GPL and which we have no control over, and which is currently (although this may not always be the case) absolutely critical. Compared to VEX, idalink is a quite trivial component...

[cao]

To put in writing: I do agree. I would prefer BSD, but have no objections to MIT or LGPL. Using the same license as angr would probably be the easiest.

[rhelmot]

I'd agree to any of the licensed cao mentioned above.

We should really, like, get a lawyer and determine how the licenses actually interact and what restrictions actually apply for various use-cases?

[adrianherrera]

I have no issue with any license change. If I had to choose I would choose
either BSD or MIT.

On Thu, 15 Sep 2016, 8:20 AM Andrew Dutcher notifications@github.com
wrote:

I'd agree to any of the licensed cao mentioned above.

We should really, like, get a lawyer and determine how the licenses
actually interact and what restrictions actually apply for various
use-cases?

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[zardus]

Done!

[zachriggle]

@zardus In which of the various libraries, and in what form, are the dependencies on VEX -- and were they existing implementations?

[rhelmot]

@zardus can you pull from gitlab and push to here, I just pushed something to change the license field in setup.py to 'BSD'

[zardus]

@zachriggle, moving the VEX discussion to the pwntools issue.

[zachriggle]

👍

[zachriggle]

Also, I concede henceforth to always use angr instead of Angr ❤️