Re: [guppi-list] Re: use of GSL in guppi

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

On Mon, Sep 14, 1998 at 01:05:33PM +0200, Asger Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
> > Now it looks like most of the good free numerical/statistical code out
> > there (GSL, R) is GPLed.  Since I don't want to reinvent the wheel, my
> > options seem to be:
> > 
> >   (1) Switch Goose to GPL.
> > 
> >   (2) Convince everybody else to go LGPL, or convince everybody else to
> >       distribute their code to me under the LGPL.
> 
> As you would think, I opt for 2).  
> 

OK, I'm convinced.  I think that it is important to create a situation
where it is in the best interests of commercial software providers to
contribute to the free software community.  So I'll stick with LGPL.

So now the question is, how to do that?  The only code I'm interested
in "borrowing" from other projects, for right now at least, are
numerical routines for special functions and matrix operations.  This
is really just a small part of what Goose will be, though.

Here is what I propose to do:

(1) I spent all day Sunday working on Goose, and mixed in some R code
    for numerics.  (It is all very localized and carefully labelled.)
    In the process, I switched everything over to GPL.  I'm going to
    release this GPLed version as Goose 0.0.2 today, mainly because it
    has a *lot* of improvements over the last version and I want to
    keep up some momentum.

(2) I'll contact the R people and see if they will either:
    (a) Switch their numerical stuff over to LGPL.
    (b) Give me a special exception to redistribute stuff derived from
        their code as LGPL.

(3) If that doesn't work, we'll just have to re-implement the
    necessary numerical routines from scratch.  Luckily, a lot of the
    R numerics have references attached --- so at the worst case, I'll
    have to spend some time in the library looking up the various
    books and journal articles they got the algorithms from, and then
    code them up myself.

(4) Repeat steps (2) and (3) with the GSL people.  Goose doesn't use
    any of GSL yet, since I found their special functions library to
    be a bit short on statistical stuff.  But once we get our own
    versions of the necessary functions, we can (and should)
    contribute them to the GSL project.  Then, if GSL goes LGPL, we
    can just use them from there.

(5) Once the dust settles, I'll produce a non-GPL-tainted, LGPLed
    Goose 0.0.3 that will perfectly match 0.0.2 in functionality, but
    with all GPLed internals replaced by LGPLed code.

-JT