RE: BLAS License

[Kazushige Goto]

Jordi,

 First, thank you very much for interesting in my library.
Unfortunately it isn't GPL based library, but it's only free for
academic purpose. This is our department decision, and I don't think
changing to GPL is easy.
But you can still access various BLAS implementations including free or
vendor's library and performance of most library are pretty good (and
this difference (around 1-2% of peak) doesn't make any sense for Octave,
I think).
By the way, I don't need name recognition, but I only need correct
architecture knowledge to perform library better.

Thanks,
 Kazushige Goto

-----Original Message-----
From: Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 8:32 AM
To: Kazushige Goto
Cc: Octave Help
Subject: BLAS License

Hi. In the following thread for the GNU Octave mailing list, your
software was discussed:

     http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2006-May/000206.html

I'm curious. Why haven't you considering liberating your code under
the GPL? If you indeed are committed to making academic software such
as GNU Octave, GPLing your code or similarly liberating it would be
most beneficial for everyone involved. You would benefit because it
would make your code much more widely available and hence give you
more recognition. It would also make all of your users immensely
happy. which seems to be something that concerns you. Plus, you could
potentially then have people from all around helping you with the
laborious task of code maintenance and debugging.

Don't worry. If it's name recognition you want, you'll still get it
even if your code is free software. We all know, for example, that
John W. Eaton is one of the main driving forces behind GNU Octave,
together with many other contributors, all carefully acknowledged
here:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/acknowledgments.html

I hope you reconsider the licensing terms of your software. Of all
people, academics need free software the most (especially academics
like myself who live in underprivileged countries). Don't let anyone
tell you otherwise.

I am posting this email to Octave's mailing list too, since they
seemed interested in this issue.

Best,
- Jordi G. H.