COIN-OR in Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Oct-2004, Andrey Romanenko <address@hidden> wrote:

| Here is a thought. On one hard, present optimization capabilities of
| Octave are somewhat scarce. On the other hand, there is a nice
| initiative (www.coin-or.org) developing optimization algorithms in
| open-source. Is there any reason why we cannot interface Octave with
| the COIN code? The license is CPL and it is OSI compatible. In the
| FAQ section of the site there is a question about CPL code in GPL
| code that it a little strange, but it can be worked out. Will it be
| interesting for the community?

It would be great to be able to use the code from the COIN project
with Octave, but my understanding is that the CPL is not GPL
compatible, so we can't use it.  Additionally, there are components of
COIN that I have looked at in the past that require non-free software
to work (for example, parts of the Harwell library for doing sparse
matrix computations).

Code linked with Octave, whether it is built-in, or in the form of a
dynamically linked .oct file, must be distributed under terms that are
compatible with the GPL.  The Free Software Foundation has a list of
software licenses at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html,
along with an explanation of why they are (or are not) compatible with
the GPL.  The entry for the CPL is

  Common Public License Version 1.0
    This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the
    GPL.  The Common Public License is incompatible with the GPL
    because it has various specific requirements that are not in the
    GPL.  For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given
    that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent
    license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless
    they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)

jwe



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