Re: New package

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On Tue, 2014-07-22 at 16:18 +0200, c. wrote:
> On 22 Jul 2014, at 15:58, Guillermo Moliní <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > What terms of the GNU License make it illegal? the link I just
> > gave you above also has a GNU Library General Public License
> > (LGPL), and does what I intend to do. That is, provide a wrapper
> > (in that case for c#, in mine for octave), so that the cuda api
> > can be used. Couldnt it be considered the cuda API as a system
> > library under section 7?
> 
> I am not a lawyer, if you need advice on this please ask
> address@hidden for more details. c.

Yes, please ask.

CUDA is a big problem for free software. It likely does not qualify as
a system library since it's not normally distributed with the OS.
Typically you have to go and download the CUDA runtime separately. It
is very problematic to have non-free libraries controlling our
computations. This problem is more or less the whole reason why
packages like Octave are necessary.

At any rate, please ask address@hidden, and let us know what their
response is.

Everyone is rushing to use the pretty little GPU features that they
are peddling to us without making a free library that can use them.
There are OpenCL alternatives like Clover and even embryonic CUDA
libraries like Gdev <https://github.com/shinpei0208/gdev>. But in our
rush to be dazzled by pretty features, we're neglecting the important
infrastructure needed in order to freely hack our own code. We've seen
this before with PDF.

- Jordi G. H.