Re: eigs and Octave.app

[David Bateman]

Mark McClure wrote:
>
>  2) My impression is that eigs is unlikely to every be included
>     in the standard Octave distribution due to license concerns
>     involving ARPACK.  Is this correct?
>
> I ask the second question more for my students than for myself.
> I'll be teaching a class in numerical linear algebra next
> semester.  Our students have some access to Matlab on campus, but
> I'd like to let them know about Octave as a viable alternative to
> potentially save some of them some money and to expose them to
> open source software.  Many of our applications of interest
> involve eigensystems of large sparse matrices, however, so a
> working eigs function is really essential.

Well, Sorensen isn't necessarily against a GPL distribution of ARPACK
from what he said to me. However, he would be required to negotiate with
Rice Universities Lawyers to allow this. The license terms of ARPACK
allow full distribution in both source and binary form of ARPACK with
Octave. The restriction of ARPACK is trivial in that Rice University
must be informed when ARPACK is used in a different project. The prove is

If anyone wants to try and contact Sorensen and try and get a full GPL
release then I'd be happy to see it happen, but go light and use the
phone rather than e-mail..

D.



>
> Thanks again,
> Mark
>


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