"Academic" Licenses, GPL, and "Free" Software | LingPipe Blog

“Academic” Licenses, GPL, and “Free” Software | LingPipe Blog

[This post repeats a long comment I posted about licensing in response to Brendan O’Connor’s blog entry, End-to-End NLP Packages . Brendan’s post goes over some packages for NLP and singles out LingPipe as being only “quasi free.”] Restrictive “Academic-Only” Licenses Some of those other packages, like C&C Tools and Senna , are in the same “quasi free” category as LingPipe in the sense that they’re released under what their authors call “non-commercial” licenses. For instance, none of the Senna, C&C, or LingPipe licenses are compatible with GPL-ed code. Senna goes so far as to prohibit derived works altogether. The LingPipe License Truly Free NLP Software The other tools, like NLTK, Mallet, OpenNLP, and GATE are released under more flexible licenses (LGPL, Apache or BSD), which I really do think of as being truly “free”. Mahout’s also in this category, though not mentioned by Brendan,

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