HDF5 and GPL

Hdf-forum archives
1

Hello all,

     A quick question about HDF5 and open source. In particular,
I'm curious about compatibility with GPLv3. Generally,
it seems that HDF5 is under NCSA's license has been verified to
be compatible with the GPL as can be verified on fsf.org. There are
also portions under LLNL's license, which is a simple permissive
non-copyleft license and these sorts of things are also generally
regards as compatible with the GPL.
     One possible concern is the compression libraries, as licensing
and compression has been an issue for the FSF in the past.
I presume that all of the HDF5 code for compression is still provided
under NCSA's license, and thus no extra licensing issues are
present, but I wanted to double-check this. Specifically, is there
code for compression in the HDF5 source tree which is not
provided under either the NCSA or LLNL license?

Thank you,
Andrew

2

Hi Andrew,

···

On Mar 4, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Andrew W. Steiner wrote:

Hello all,

    A quick question about HDF5 and open source. In particular,
I'm curious about compatibility with GPLv3. Generally,
it seems that HDF5 is under NCSA's license has been verified to
be compatible with the GPL as can be verified on fsf.org. There are
also portions under LLNL's license, which is a simple permissive
non-copyleft license and these sorts of things are also generally
regards as compatible with the GPL.
    One possible concern is the compression libraries, as licensing
and compression has been an issue for the FSF in the past.
I presume that all of the HDF5 code for compression is still provided
under NCSA's license, and thus no extra licensing issues are
present, but I wanted to double-check this. Specifically, is there
code for compression in the HDF5 source tree which is not
provided under either the NCSA or LLNL license?

  No, all the code we distribute is under the NCSA license (or the LLNL one). The external libraries that HDF5 can use are distributed separately and with their own license terms.

  Quincey