Licensing GPL / EPL

Hi all,

First Knime is really impressive stuff, thanks for all of your hard work. I’ve been reluctant to adopt it much however because of GPL. Please don’t take that as a criticism, just a data point. :slight_smile: I’m wondering if recent guidance from FSF and Eclipse Foundation regarding fundamental lack of compatibility between EPL and GPL, i.e. see http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/mike/2010/04/06/epl-gpl-commentary/ has brought up any discussion or concern about licensing in the future?

cheers,

Miles

Hi Miles,

you are correct, EPL and GPL are rather different animals. Since we are including wrappers for quite a few GPL covered toolkits (Weka, R…), we did not really have much of a choice, though.

Michael

Hi Michael,

Yes, I was just talking to someone who wanted to use Weka and we realized we couldn’t when we found out it was GPL. It’s a bummer because it means that there is a lot of stuff that is really cool out there that we can’t use directly (Eclipse Foundation has really strict requirements about this stuff) and because of license we can’t even use it indirectly by providing non-Eclipse hosted tools. And it works both ways so that according to the license if the Weka project wanted to use EPL stuff they couldn’t!

Anyway, there is some really neat potential here – you’ve done a tremendous amount of important work and it would be great to be able to integrate Knime with the Agent Modeling Project but as it is we’ll need to implement a lot of similar (but not exactly the same) functionality on our own. If you’d be interested in talking off-line with me about it please send me an email at milesparker a-t g-m_a-i-l.

cheers,
Miles
Project Lead
Eclipse Agent Modeling Platform