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Switching from GPL 3 to BSD 3 License #388

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@argerlt

What are people's thoughts on switching from the GPL 3 license to a more liberal BSD license, such as what is in scipy?

In my research, I work a lot with the United States Air Force, as well as NSF-funded university projects. In both cases, the end goal is to create technology that everyone can use, both commercially and in academia. As such, my collaborators often refer to Orix as a "ticking legal time bomb", and pretty much guarantees our industry partners will refuse to work with us on projects utilizing Orix.

Obviously I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and changing a license is not something to be taken lightly, but switching to a BSD 3 Like this one from scipy would significantly broaden the projects I would be allowed to incorporate Orix into.

Case in point: HEXRD is a fantastic tool for studying far field synchrotron data, and is the de-facto program used at several of the CHESS beamlines, and also sees heavy use by some users at APS. It's handling of orientations would benefit from an update, and I would like to use Orix for this purpose. However, the GPL license makes this a non-starter for the HEXRD team, so I am instead forced to make my contributions using scipy Rotations, which are slower lack the functionality of Orix quaternion objects.

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