On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic@gmail.com> wrote:

On 26 January 2011 07:32, gutti <philipp.guttenberg@gmx.net> wrote:
> The H-Matrix and the prelude numeric packages however, which in my mind
> cover really important ground work, are issued under the resprictive GPL.

I think your description of "restrictive" is contentious...

Perhaps, but its true. ;)

> Is that only because they link into other external GNU - libaries with GPL
> license ? -- If yes would be repackaging the haskell-native bits in an extra
> BSD package an option ?

Or else because the developers _wanted_ to license it under the GPL.
Some people do, you know.

Actually, not to quote him out of context, but a short snippet from an email to me from Alberto last year shows this isn't the case here in the author's own words.

> It is GPL because of ignorance and laziness. For hmatrix I really want the less restrictive license compatible with the fact that it is based on (calls functions from) BLAS/LAPACK (BSD) and GSL (GPL). Can I change the license to something like BSD?

This is from when we were discussing how to integrate hmatrix better with my ad package. He was interested in using 'ad' to compute over vectors, and I had a variation on the ad types that would allow them to compute with larger jacobian fragments, but wasn't able or willing to build on the basic hmatrix package, due to the licensing. He was very open to the idea of BSD licensing and to the idea of potentially factoring it apart into GPL and BSD packages if the GSL dependent portions could not be so licensed.

The main reason this didn't happen is that this fell off my critical path and I moved on to other things.

-Edward Kmett