Hello all,
Starting with the next release, the netCDF team intends to migrate away from
the historic 'home-brewed' copyright that was written at Unidata, in favor of
the BSD 3-clause license (viewable here:
https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause). This change does not result in
any new restrictions; it is merely the adoption of a standard, well-known and
well-understood license in place of the historic NetCDF license. This is part
of a broader push at Unidata to adopt modern, standardized open-source
licensing amongst our various projects.
Because licensing changes can potentially signal a big change in how software
might be used, I *really* want to emphasize that this change is simply to
standardize on a well-understood license, and is not meant to introduce any new
limitations on how you can use netCDF. You can follow the link above to review
the brief license, but in short: "You may use this software for whatever you
like, as long as you maintain this copyright notice". It does not introduce
any sort of restrictions for commercial software, nor does it propagate itself
in the fashion of the GPLv3.
I wanted to get this announcement out so that we can answer any questions which
folks might have well in advance of it taking effect; if it provokes a broader
discussion of licensing terms, or if there are concerns I hadn't considered,
we'd love to hear about that too.
Have a great day all,
-Ward
Ward Fisher
wfisher@xxxxxxxx
UCAR/Unidata - Software Engineer
NetCDF team lead
