[Biopython-dev] Adopting BSD 3-Clause license for Biopython?

[Peter Cock]

Hello all,

Something Brad and I chatted about during the BOSC 2013 CodeFest
was should we switch the Biopython licence to something which is
formally approved as "Open Source" by The Open Source Initiative
(OSI): http://opensource.org/licenses

The current Biopython License is very short and liberal, and I have
long described it as an MIT/BSD type licence. However the actual
wording matches neither of these exactly (as far as I could tell):

http://biopython.org/DIST/LICENSE
https://github.com/biopython/biopython/blob/master/LICENSE

In theory we could ask the OSI to approve our current license, but as
they explain "yet another license" is not a good thing to encourage:
http://opensource.org/proliferation

Brad and I thought it would be reasonable to adopt a standard
MIT/BSD licence instead.

Note that the following lack a "no endorsement" clause which we
have currently:

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause

Therefore this looks like the closest match:

http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

i.e. The BSD 3-Clause ("BSD New" or "BSD Simplified") license.
This is also used by the NumPy project and many other Python
libraries.

Assuming people agree this is a good idea, we can start doing
this on a file-by-file basis (checking for approval from the named
copyright holders) and to be rigorous check with every named
contributor in the CONTRIB or NEWS files.

Peter