I am reading the license for Nengo and I would like to ask if it is in all cases libre/free software, not in terms of money but in terms of freedom. For personal or research use it seems to be as you have the freedom to use, copy, share, and make derivative works but it is unclear to me if it remains so for commercial use.
Basically as I see it, it all boils down to whether the commercial license is simply a paid option while retaining the same freedom as the personal/research one or it is also more restrictive.
When someone buys a commercial license does he simply pays a specific amount of money and retain the same freedom to use, copy, share, and make derivative works or the license terms change in any way?
Hi @Adam_Antios! Welcome to the forum!
The short answer is that no, at the moment, Nengo is not free software. A commercial license gives certain rights in specific commercial contexts, and the specific rights will depends on the context.
Thank you for the answer. Are there plans for that to change in the future?
I can’t really say either way. Recently, we extracted some generally useful parts of the Nengo core out into separate projects that we released under the open source MIT license (pytest-plt, pytest-rng, pytest-allclose). Culturally, we (ABR) want to contribute to the open source community while not closing good commercialization avenues for us, so as we figure out the avenues that work for us we’ll also keep looking for opportunities to contribute.
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