Re: archive of optimisation routines

[Daniel Heiserer]

Hi all,

> On  3-May-1999, heberf <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> | These look pretty good to me.  Could someone who understands the GPL
> | better than I do take a look at this page and tell me if it's
> | compatible with the GPL.  If someone needs to talk to Professor Ye
> | then I'll nominate myself.  I may have a little pull given that we
> | are both business school professors.
> 
> The copyright notice on the web page says:
> 
>   These software disclose material protectable under copyright laws of
>   the United States. Permission is hereby granted to use, reproduce,
>   prepare derivative works, and redistribute to others at no charge,
>   provided that the original copyright notice, Government license and
>   disclaimer are retained and any changes are clearly documented;
>   however, any entity desiring permission to incorporate this software
>   or a work based on the software into a product for sale must contact
>   Yinyu Ye at the Department of Management Science, The University of
>   Iowa.
> 
> The problem is the part about incorporating the software or a work
> based on it into a product for sale.  Since Octave may be sold or
> included on a CD that is for sale, and the GPL doesn't allow adding
> restrictions like this, there is a conflict.

Ok. We had this problem also a few weeks ago with this sparse stuff from
Youssef Saad. Luckily Andi Adler as already done some sparse stuff
which looks really nice and SHOULD be integrated into octave core.

I think, maybe I am wrong, but  the original authors are not aware of 
what kind of problems they are causing with their "private" Copyrights.
It looks that they want that this stuff IS USED and FREELY AVAILABLE 
for everybody. 
Limiting for non-commercial usage they probably aim at making no
binary-distributions for US-$ 1[0]*000.--.  (this should be a regexp
;-))
I think they are not aware of the fact that the GPL does not 
forbid commercial usage (selling $ 30,- CD's that is less than a
man-hour 
to toast that shit including machine costs) BUT will implicitly
make it of no economic interest because you have to give the source with
it
and you have to allow everybody to redistribute it without other
restrictions
then putting it under GPL again (maye something else, please correct
me).

Long sentences, short sense:

We have to convince these guys to put their software under GPL.

So who does that?


-- 
Mit freundlichen Gruessen
                                 Daniel Heiserer
-----
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Dipl.-Phys. Daniel Heiserer, BMW AG, Knorrstrasse 147, 80788 Muenchen
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