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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 licens

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 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
> The currently active fork of SDSL (https://github.com/xxsds/sdsl-lite 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 4y ago
  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.
  - sam_bristow 4y ago
    It looks pretty sus to me for a couple of reasons: - the commiter who changed the license has zero commits in the upstream repo - the commit message has no other context or links to a discussion
    - jltsiren 4y ago
      The person who changed the license was one of the main developers of SDSL and one of the coauthors of the papers describing the library. They made plenty of commits to the library, as you can see by looking at the commit histories of individual files. They don't appear on the list of contributors for whatever obscure reason related to the internal workings of GitHub.
      - sam_bristow 4y ago
        Ah, in that case I take it back. That's great news.
      - kroltan 4y ago
        Their commits are probably using an email not associated with their GitHub account, which is, as far as I know, how GH associates attribution. Maybe GH should list contributions not associated to any account by their commit email directly, instead of hiding the contributors, but that's a different matter :P

wrs 4y ago

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 4y ago

> The currently active fork of SDSL (https://github.com/xxsds/sdsl-lite 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 4y ago
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.
- sam_bristow 4y ago
  It looks pretty sus to me for a couple of reasons: - the commiter who changed the license has zero commits in the upstream repo - the commit message has no other context or links to a discussion
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    The person who changed the license was one of the main developers of SDSL and one of the coauthors of the papers describing the library. They made plenty of commits to the library, as you can see by looking at the commit histories of individual files. They don't appear on the list of contributors for whatever obscure reason related to the internal workings of GitHub.
    - sam_bristow 4y ago
      Ah, in that case I take it back. That's great news.
    - kroltan 4y ago
      Their commits are probably using an email not associated with their GitHub account, which is, as far as I know, how GH associates attribution. Maybe GH should list contributions not associated to any account by their commit email directly, instead of hiding the contributors, but that's a different matter :P