Re: COIN-OR in Octave

[Andrey Romanenko]

Hello,

On Monday 18 October 2004 14:50, John W. Eaton wrote:

> 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.  

I see... However, the COIN FAQ section states that a software module under a 
different
license does not have to comply with the CPL. The question is where is
the border between a module and purely derived work... 
Will the following be okay? Octave creates an AMPL (from netlib) formulation
and sends it to IPOPT, gets the results and pushes it back to Octave.

> 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).

I haven't looked at that closely, maybe there is GPLed code available
for those sparse matrix computations...

Andrey



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