Licensing conflict of Python library lmoments3 with xclim

[saschahofmann]

Apologies in advance for intruding on this repo so rudely but I would like to ask for your permission to change the license of a derivative of this L-moments library in Python.

As you might be aware, Sam Gillespie did a translation of your code to Python for lmoments3 library a few years back. Since this makes lmoments3 a derivative of your work it had to adopt the GPL-3 license. We are currently discussing whether it'd be possible to change the license to something more permissive, most likely BSD 3. You can find the two discussion threads here in the forum of the xclim library Ouranosinc/xclim#1619 (reply in thread) and here on the lmoments3 Ouranosinc/lmoments3#12 and the issue suggesting BSD 3 Ouranosinc/lmoments3#14.

The summary: lmoments3 currently is a core dependency of xclim which is released under Apache 2.0. This is a violation of the GPL-3 license that requires libraries that use it to be released under the same license. The maintainers of xclim will fix this for the short term by removing the dependency to lmoments3. Instead, users will be able to provide distributions e.g. from lmoments3 to the relevant functions. However, this means that users like myself who want to use xclim with lmoments3 need to release their libraries under GPL-3 themselves.

This is why we are looking into changing the license of lmoments3 itself to a more permissive one. To do this we will need permission from all contributors, past and present including - of course - you. Would you agree to changing the license?