Re: GPLv3

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Sep-2007, Quentin Spencer wrote:

| flex (gpl?)
| hdf5-devel (?)
| ncurses-devel (gpl?)
| zlib-devel (gpl?)
  libcurl
  qhull
  pcre

I looked over the licenses, and here is a summary of what I found.
Although I think they are OK, we should probably check these first
seven more closely.  I don't think any are GPL.  Their license seem to
be BSD-like, but I have not looked closely enough at them to know for
sure whether they are GPLv3 compatible.

| lapack-devel (public domain)
| blas-devel (public domain)

Yes, I think that these are essentially OK for any purpose, but we
also use ATLAS, which has a different license, and like zlib and
ncurses, I haven't looked at it closely enough to know for sure
whether it is GPLv3 compatible, but I think it is.

| suitesparse-devel (bsd-like ?)

SuiteSparse appears to be distributed under the terms of LGPLv2.1
only, and not "any later version".  But I think that is OK if we only
want to use the library and not copy code from it (see the GPL FAQ
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility).

| bison (gpl?)
| fftw-devel (gpl)
| gperf (gpl)
| readline-devel (gpl?)

Current versions are GPLv2 or any later version, so these should be
OK.  Also, the skeleton of the bison parser that is actually linked
with Octave includes a special exception that in most cases allows
distribution under any terms.

| glpk-devel (gpl)

The current version of glpk is GPLv3.

| gcc-gfortran (gpl)

I think they only thing that matters with the compilers are the
libraries that are linked in, so that would include libgcc and
libgfortran.  These are GPL + an exception that allows linking with
anything.  If using g77, the library is libg2c, and that appears to be
a combination of LGPLv2.1 and a "use for any purpose" license from
AT&T/Lucent for the original libf2c from which libg2c was derived.

| ghostscript (gpl)
| gnuplot (something odd and bsd-like)
| less (gpl)
| tetex (?)
| texinfo (?)

The licenses for these don't matter because they are not linked
with Octave.

I assume glibc is OK.

| These are only direct dependencies. Some of the -devel packages required 
| in the Fedora build system will pull in other dependencies. This may 
| also omit some really basic dependencies that the Fedora build system 
| installs by default.

OK.  I looked at the output of ldd octave and I think the above covers
the code we link with Octave, but I still could be missing something.

jwe