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Comment by lph | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Microsoft treats the GPL3 licensing of ZeroMQ (used by Jupyter for client-server communication)?

In my workplace, Jupyter needs special approval and can only be installed in limited environments because the company is afraid some developer will inadvertently do something that contaminates our code with GPL3.

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Pure FUD. Your workplace attorneys should talk to the FSF; it's vanishingly unlikely that you would end up accidentally licensing anything with the GPL. Besides, the GPL provisions only take effect on distribution /anyway/.

Why would the GPL apply to works created with Jupyter? I understand if you're redistributing a commercial version of it, but using it would be akin to using GCC no?

My understanding is that works created with Jupyter wouldn't have a problem, but that the admins are just trying to minimize the footprint of GPL 3 libraries on our systems. It seems pretty knee-jerk to me, but then I'm not an expert.

In a technical audit during acquisition, for example, any use of GPL warrants extra scrutiny. Even when you're complying it is an extra bunch of work, often with lawyers reviewing, so many people would rather avoid that if possible.

/team lead/

IANAL - but note that we also have Microsoft R (and enhanced version of CRAN R) which provides local multi-threading, and cluster level parallelization + distributed memory support. It and the stock R interpreter have lots of GPL code. And given that both R & Python are now integrated with SQL Server, it seems that the lawyers have become comfortable regarding the separation lines. SQL Server for example calls an external script for R/Python.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-r-serv...

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2017...

Thanks!

ZeroMQ is LGPL, not GPL. http://zeromq.org/area:licensing

Good catch! I misremembered. Still the same reasoning from management, unfortunately.

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