It has come to my attention (some time ago, actually) that the GPL license I chose for Premake years ago is not really serving its best interests now. I've been in contact with several groups that would like to participate in the project but either can't or won't because of the "viral" nature of the license. At least one company would like to include Premake as part of the tool chain they release to their customers; we lost a golden opportunity to increase adoption there. And quite honestly, I'm not sure how far the license spreads—does it include your build scripts?
I would like to switch the project to the MIT license, the same one used by Lua. Use Premake however you want, just give attribution. I am not at all concerned with forking, as people have tried and always come back. Nor am I concerned with people making a profit from it; lord knows I would if I could figure out how.
Premake 4.0 was a complete rewrite to a completely different architecture, so there are no contributions that predate that release. Folks who have contributed code since then (not many of you) who aren't willing to relicense can contact me and I will remove or rewrite your contribution.
So what say you? Like it? Hate it? Think a different license is better (be sure to state why)? Dual license? I'd like to make this change for Premake 4.3, if possible. Feel free to contact me privately.
Share
Most excellent, I am very pleased to see a move to the MIT license. You can bet that license will help Premake to become more widely used. The old liscense was definately preventing us from sharing Premake with our customers.
This would definitely be a welcomed change. I'd love to provide premake and our .lua scripts to customers directly. As it stands now, we 'build' our solution files and package these up rather than providing premake scripts, almost entirely due to premake's use of the GPL. Providing pre-built solution files is sub-optimal and causes all sorts of trouble for our customers. For example, if we add some settings common to a number of projects via Premake, internally we simply re-run premake but our customers have to go through all of the distributed solutions and add these settings manually.
It is interesting that people feel they can not distribute either Premake or the build scripts to customers. As I mentioned on twitter http://twitter.com/OOLua/status/10635244508 I do not feel this is correct. You are free to distribute a GPL programme and link to the sourceforge page for the source and I also do not feel that the GPL effects the scripts. Yet if it did why would this be a problem?
Personally I think if MIT would encourage contributions to the library then that is for the good.
I think the MIT license would be great.
I really don't think the GPL would cover the scripts that Premake generates - but it is very scary for business-minded managers who are not license savvy.
Premake 4.3 will be released soon under the BSD license. Thanks to everyone for the feedback!