[SciPy-dev] requesting feedback on/editing of scikits wiki-page

[dmitrey]

Hi all,
I think scikits should be represented as a bunch of software with 
OSI-approved licenses.
Each routine should inform which license it has, by including the 
information in routine description, and/or by text or graphical output 
while working, and/or somehow else.
Of course, there could be devision like modules "scikitsbsd" and 
"scikitsgpl", but what for other dozens of OSI-approved licenses?
For example, take a look at PSF page:
http://www.python.org/psf/contrib/
they require either *
*Academic Free License v. 2.1 or
Apache License, Version 2.0
Of course, other licenses can appear in future, and one software 
package, for example lpsolve, can change his license from LGPL to BSD 
(or vise versa) - so how do you intend to handle the situation?

//just my 15 cents
Regards, D.
*
*
Jarrod Millman wrote:
> On 5/16/07, David Cournapeau <david@ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>   
>> One thing which may need to be changed is the license requirement. I
>> thought one of the point of scikits was to include code useful for scipy
>> community, but which cannot be licensed to BDS/MIT. For example,
>> including GPL code, or package which depends on LGPL libraries.
>> malabwrap for that matter depends on proprietary libraries to work...
>>     
>
> Thanks to Alex for putting together this information.  I don't have
> the time to respond to all his points/questions, but I wanted to
> quickly respond to David's comments about licensing.
>
> Originally, I assumed that *all* the scikit code would be released
> under the same license (ie.,  the revised BSD license like all the
> rest of scipy).  That would certainly be my preference.  My
> understanding was that the basic idea behind scikits was simply to
> provide a modular mechanism for distributing "scipy" packages under
> one namespace.
>
> There are several arguments for using the same license for all the
> packages.  First, I think that it would confusing for users importing
> "from scikits import foo, bar" to find that foo is released under one
> license and bar is released under another.  Second while we want to
> keep dependencies between scikits packages to a minimum, there will
> inevitably be a need for code from one package to be used in another.
> This may lead to code duplication if the needed functionality already
> exists in a scikit's package, but is released under the GPL when BSD
> code is needed.  Third, it is reasonable to imagine that at some
> point, someone will want to refactor the various scikit's packages.
> During a major refactoring, it may be desirable to move code from one
> package to another or even from scikits to scipy.  This will be
> difficult if it is necessary to keep track of what license each piece
> of code is released under.
>
> Basically, I think that opening up the possibility for each package to
> be released under its own license is going to make it difficult to
> maintain some unity to the scipy namespace.  I also don't know whether
> there is a need to include non-BSD code in the scikit's namespace.  We
> could easily create links to non-BSD code on the wikipages or even
> create a new namespace for code released under different licenses.  I
> would be very interested to hear arguments for why non-BSD code needs
> to be available under the scikit's namespace.
>
> Thanks,
>
>