[HN Gopher] SDSL - Succinct Data Structure Library
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       SDSL - Succinct Data Structure Library
        
       Author : signa11
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2022-09-04 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | ketzu wrote:
       | Oh wow, seeing this on the front page makes me nostalgic of my
       | bachelor thesis for the creator of SDSL 10 years ago. I remember
       | getting the question "did your resulsts get merged into SDSL?"
       | during the defense and, unfortunately, I had to say no because
       | they weren't useful in the end.
       | 
       | Glad to see Simon seems to be doing well and the project found
       | some attetion!
        
       | wrs wrote:
       | Note that this has a GPL3 (not LGPL) license. I'm curious about
       | the rationale for doing that with a template-based data
       | structures library. Why would you want to limit adoption so much?
       | 
       | (Edit: realized after typing this that yes, LGPL wouldn't change
       | anything for a template library. Question remains though.)
        
         | Nokinside wrote:
         | As it seems that there is just one copyright holder, the
         | obvious answer is that it makes buying commercial licenses more
         | likely option.
         | 
         | For a small company or single person who sells code for a
         | living, GPL is a great license as a first option. People can
         | play with the code and use it for software that is GPL
         | compatible. For everything else you must come up with a coin.
        
         | lupire wrote:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158322
         | 
         | 1. LGPL doesn't help header code.
         | 
         | 2. It not practical to change a license after receiving outside
         | contributions without copyright assignment.
         | 
         | And maybe also 3 they don't have the energy to pursue violators
         | and don't really care.
        
         | jltsiren wrote:
         | Probably the same reason as with other libraries from the
         | academia. When all free licenses are pretty much equivalent
         | from your point of view, choosing a license is just a
         | bureaucratic formality. The person choosing the license usually
         | doesn't think about the issue too much, and they probably don't
         | have that much experience with licenses anyway.
         | 
         | The currently active fork of SDSL
         | (https://github.com/xxsds/sdsl-lite) has a BSD license. There
         | was supposed to be a team developing the fork, but most people
         | either left the academia or had their research interests move
         | elsewhere. Now there seems to be just a single developer who
         | maintains SDSL as a byproduct of SeqAn.
        
           | wrs wrote:
           | What surprises me is that I would think the usual goal of an
           | academic project is to make it usable as broadly as possible
           | (indeed, the least restricted licenses originated from
           | universities). And that every institution would have figured
           | out license guidance so it wouldn't be an accidental choice.
        
           | WCSTombs wrote:
           | > The currently active fork of SDSL
           | (https://github.com/xxsds/sdsl-lite) has a BSD license.
           | 
           | How is that legally possible? As I understand, the GPL
           | doesn't allow a derivative work to remove the copyleft
           | provisions from the license.
           | 
           | Or maybe I misunderstood your comment?
        
             | kroltan wrote:
             | Not sure if this is the case here, but you can change the
             | license of an open source project by unanimous permission
             | of every contributor. (Possibly removing the contributions
             | from those who disagree)
             | 
             | This will not revoke the licenses for copies already in
             | use, but any future users will be subject to whatever
             | license the version they're using uses.
        
         | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-04 23:01 UTC)