Re: [Savannah-hackers] Scicalc

[Sylvain Beucler]

On 2004.07.26 23:32 Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> address@hidden wrote:
> > Scicalc may be compiled to do computations in arbitrary arithmetic
> > precision. Unfortunately, to do so Scicalc must be linked against
> > the MAPM library (version >= 4.8). This is an "almost free" library:
> > it is distributed under a modified BSD license, which requires
> > that modifications to the source code are distributed as patches.
> > To have more information about MAPM see the MAPM home page:
> >
> > www.tc.umn.edu/~ringx004/mapm-main.html
>
> MAPM seems to be non-free.
>
> This leads to troubles I'll detail as soon as I get confirmation from 
> address@hidden

Dave Turner told me that MAPM meets the Free Software Definition 
requirement, but is not compatible with the GNU GPL, which means we 
accept MAPM as a dependency, but that your GPL'd project cannot use it.

I see three ways to fix this:
- you could use the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library 
(www.gnu.org/software/gmp), which is licensed under the GNU LGPL;
- you could ask the MAPM author to release his/her library under a 
GPL-compatible license (see 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses);
- if you are the copyright holder of your whole project (which means 
you received no contribution, or that contributors officially gave you 
their copyright), then you could add a notice such as "This program is 
released under the GPL with the additional exemption that compiling, 
linking, and/or using MAPM is allowed." I am not 100% sure this is the 
perfect notice, so if you choose this method, please tell me and I'll 
ask for confirmation.

--
Sylvain