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by Lapha
910 days ago
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If it were just a standalone tool it wouldn't affect the licencing of the project, but it's not a tool, it's a software library, so projects using the library need to follow the terms of the GPL. The tricky part here is that it's a library that produces graphs which themselves aren't covered by the terms of the GPL. The intent of the tool seems to be that you use it to produce graphs during development for benchmarking or during research or whatever where the tool is internal but the graphs aren't necessarily internal, in which case the licence of the library is mostly irrelevant as the GPL is mostly concerned with distributing software to other users of said software, not the output of the software, but if you later choose to want to release that tool it really aught to follow the terms of the GPL and be under a licence compatible with the GPL, so the note about it being a GPL licenced library is completely valid. You should use a more permissive LGPL/MIT/BSD/whatever licenced library like benchit if you don't want to have to think about this sort of stuff. |
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This may be in the spirit of Free-as-in-freedom software, but I don't think it's grounded in the reality of copyright and the GPL. With the usual disclaimer that IANAL: copyright attaches to the work (the code), and is retained by the author. The author grants you certain rights to use, modify, and redistribute the code subject to conditions (the GPL). Those constraints only encumber your works that are derivative of the GPL-licensed code i.e. either direct modifications of original source or linking original/derived object code.
A product that directly and necessarily imported perfplot would probably itself need to be GPL licensed to be distributed. A product developed with merely the assistance of something like perfplot would not need to be licensed in any particular way, any more than software written in Emacs needs to be GPL licensed.