[mhartl]

The resurrection of SciRuby is great news, but the use of the GPL was one of the first things I noticed, and I strongly recommend using a more permissive license. The MIT license would be a good choice. In addition to avoiding the fears associated with the viral nature of the GPL, using the MIT license would be more in line with the culture of the Ruby community. Most Ruby software I know of (though not, strangely enough, Ruby itself) is MIT-licensed, and people will be more comfortable with SciRuby if it conforms to this expectation.

[mohawkjohn]

The main reason we initially chose GPL, I think, was because while we had strong respect and appreciation for the MIT-license-like Ruby culture, we were more concerned about the science culture.

In other words, what could we do to provide another arm-twisting mechanism to force publishing authors to release their source code? We wanted to facilitate openness among people who might join the Ruby community by way of SciRuby, as opposed to those who might join the SciRuby community by way of Ruby.

Whether or not we can actually enforce release of source code is an open question. Certainly many journals and funding agencies have enormous problems here.

What about a joint license? For example, is the following practical? "If you publish your work in an academic context, SciRuby is GPLv3 for you. If you do not publish your work in an academic context, SciRuby is MIT."

[mhartl]

Dual-licensing under MIT and GPLv3 would probably do the trick.