From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14123 invoked by alias); 14 Apr 2010 08:59:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 14109 invoked by uid 22791); 14 Apr 2010 08:59:55 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mail.network-theory.co.uk (HELO mail.network-theory.co.uk) (66.199.228.187) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:59:48 +0000 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:59:00 -0000 Message-ID: From: Brian Gough To: Sergey Bochkanov Cc: gsl-discuss@sourceware.org Subject: Re: GSL and ALGLIB In-Reply-To: <758802574.20100413142051@alglib.net> References: <758802574.20100413142051@alglib.net> User-Agent: Wanderlust/2.14.0 (Africa) Emacs/22.2 Mule/5.0 (SAKAKI) MIME-Version: 1.0 (generated by SEMI 1.14.6 - "Maruoka") Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Message-Mac: e79254634c61294203f3d281f9e7c3f8 Mailing-List: contact gsl-discuss-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gsl-discuss-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2010-q2/txt/msg00002.txt.bz2 At Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:20:51 +0400, Sergey Bochkanov wrote: > What do GSL developers think about using source code from ALGLIB in > GSL? > > ALGLIB is an open source numerical analysis library distributed under > GPL 2+. It uses automatic translation from specially designed > pseudocode to provide same functionality in C++, C#, FreePascal and > other programming languages. Project aims to be highly portable, > compiler- and OS-independent. It is actively developed (new releases > each month). > > ALGLIB contains many interesting algorithms which are missing in GSL. > > For example, it includes: > * limited memory BFGS optimizer > * improved Levenberg-Marquardt optimizer > * bound constrained optimizer > * 2-dimensional interpolation (bilinear/bicubic splines) > * scattered N-dimensional interpolation/fitting with linearithmic > complexity. > > It should be easy to write GSL-ish wrapper for ALGLIB. I can help if > someone wants to implement it. However it is unclear what is GSL devs > position on using external libraries. I've read past discussions on > FLAME and FFTW, but there was no decision. Hello Sergey Thanks for your email. There are two concerns here, licensing and technical. Regarding licensing, I think we corresponded about ALGLIB a couple of years ago and I asked if the underlying converter was free software (which it was not at that time). The GPL defines source code as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" -- which in this case is the underlying algorithm definitions for the converter, not the individual routines. We could only consider using other code if all the associated software (and documentation) is free. Whether it makes sense techically to use ALGLIB in GSL, it is difficult for me to comment without the converter being free software and available to study. I do think the principle of converting to different languages from a common source is a good one and would encourage you to consider releasing everything under a free software license, whether or not we might use parts of it. -- best regards Brian Gough GNU Scientific Library - http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/