Discussion: license changes

[evamaxfield]

I am opening this issue to have centralized discussion over the two options that are available for this package for handling upstream license changes.

1. napari-aicsimageio only supports non-GPL open access licensed readers. I.e. TIFF, PNG, GIF, Zarr, ND2, DV, etc. and napari-aicsimageio is able to stay BSD-3
2. napari-aicsimageio continues to install all formats (including bioformats, lif, etc.) and we change the license to GPL.

I guess there is a third option where we do both and we release napari-aicsimageio under BSD and napari-aicsimageio-gpl under GPL.

Thoughts? @tlambert03 @psobolewskiPhD

[psobolewskiPhD]

Woof, I have no idea.
I will say this: I've learned my way around python and aicsimageio, so napari-aicsimageio is a convenience more then anything.
But!
I have coworkers that I'm trying to sell on python and the napari environment. For them, the easy GUI nature of the plugin system is a boon. So the question is which of these options would be least disruptive to someone not using the command-line.
Now, if there was a message that would enable the user to open the napari console and paste something to get functionality, that could be a happy medium?

[tlambert03]

tricky... on the one hand, I'd say "lets just make it GPL and bundle everything". This package, unlike aicsimageio, is sort of an "end point" (which is how I'm beginning to see GPL 😂) ... and I don't imagine anyone needing to depend on it. (napari-bioformats is also GPL)

however ... I would like it if this plugin eventually became the "de-facto" reader plugin for napari... and possibly added to napari's [all] extra. and i imagine that auto-bundling everything here would make that difficult.

so, I guess I'm kinda leaning towards #3, where napari-aicsimageio-gpl is a metapackage that just installs napari-aicsimageio bioformats_jar readlif ...

[evamaxfield]

This package, unlike aicsimageio, is sort of an "end point" (which is how I'm beginning to see GPL 😂 )

This is basically my sentiment too. I somewhat want to say "for now" we move this library over to GPL and then in a couple of months after more readers find their way in, we can figure out how to do CI building of two packages from a single library

Unless you have an example handy somewhere that does this sort of thing already that we can build off of. If it is easy, then we can do it both here and upstream in aicsimageio itself.