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Comment by adolgert | Hacker News Reader

The Gnu Public License forbids redistribution unless what you distribute is also GPL. It means I can't use this in anything I share on behalf of scientific groups that want to use Open Source. I've run into this a few times, and it's rough when GSL is so useful.

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You don't have to distribute your own stuff under the terms of the GPL. Any other GPL-compatible license will work. Most open source licenses are GPL-compatible, so you should have no problem.

Of course, like you say, this only matters if you want to redistribute. For in-house use, everything's allowed.

Furthermore, unless you're distributing binaries with the GSL compiled in, you can use any license you want for your own code. The things you wrote, you wrote. You can distribute those things however you like.

Six months ago, I , like OP, was very confused and concerned about this same issue. One of several discussions that helped me sort it out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477840

Just dynamically link to GSL, don't distribute GSL with your app, and you'll be fine. Most of your colleagues would have it installed on their computers anyway...

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that dynamic linking doesn't get you around having to use a GPL compatible license if you link to the library [1][2] and distribute your code to others. That is why GNU releases the standard c libraries as LGPL rather than GPL so you can link to them without having to be GPL compatible yourself.

I personally would appreciate it if the GSL went to LGPL. I have certainly been in situations where an employer wasn't ready to release their source code under GPL but would have sponsored me to add new functionality to GSL if we could link to it under LGPL. That said I can understand the reasons the authors went straight GPL and really appreciate all the amazing work they've done as it is a really nice library with a lot of functionality and pretty solid documentation the times I've used it.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.en.html [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1114045/gpl-and-lgpl-open...

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