Consider using a more permissive license

[bdrung]

The GPL forces every code using your library to also use GPL. Please consider using a more permissive license like Expat, BSD, or at least LGPL.

The ioctl.h header file is licensed under GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note and due to the Linux-syscall-note your library can use whatever license you want.

[ccazabon]

Just curious: why would the author consider using a "more permissive license"?

"The GPL forces every code using your library to also use GPL" is a feature, not a bug, of the GPL.

[bdrung]

Using GPL for a library forces the application to be GPL as well. Permissive licenses cannot be used for the application and using additional libraries that are using incompatible licences cannot be used (e.g. GPL v2 vs v3, etc).

[vpelletier]

I had left this issue open because I could not make my mind back then. I still cannot completely make it now, but with the renewed attention I guess I should put the current state of my thoughts here.

On the linux-syscall-note aspect, it is not clear to me whether a translation of the header in another language is comparable to including the verbatim C header file. Maybe adding the with-syscall-note to this project's license would be acceptable (both from you side and from the kernel's side). I would tend to assume the C header authors' intent would be to allow translations under the same license as the original, but that's my assumption.

On the more general aspect of contributing code useful to others, I feel this project is so trivial that I would rather have it just be included in the python standard library than stay separate: I implemented this on the heels of discovering the python fcntl module exposed ioctl without also exposing equivalents to these quite essential C macros. I admit my own laziness (then and since) and have not looked into how it should be contributed to the standard library.

[C0rn3j]

@vpelletier if you're down to figure out how to get it upstreamed, I can help out by PRing typing and migrating away from setup.py to pyproject.toml.

[vpelletier]

@C0rn3j I would indeed be interested, thanks, and sorry for this late reply.

[C0rn3j]

I've sent in the pyproject.toml conversion and some broad typing for most of the stuff, someone with more experience can probably dial it in better, but it should do.