Re: [Savannah-hackers] Scicalc

[ivano . primi]

>
>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 have to describe here which is the actual situation of my software.
Scicalc has been completely written by myself so i am the unique
copyright holder of this project. To do its job, Scicalc must be linked
against a library, called libyvy or simply Yvy, which has been written by
myself
too. Also for Yvy, I am the unique copyright holder. Between the features
provided by this library there is a "module", called MAPMX, which can be
used
to do arbitrary precision computations with complex numbers. Previously,
MAPMX was distributed separately, BUT always under GPL (there is a link
on the MAPM home page).  Moreover, MAPMX uses MAPM but DOES NOT SHARE
ANY LINE OF CODE with it.
Unfortunately MAPMX relies on MAPM, which seems to be not GPL compatible.
When I created MAPMX I did not worry about compatibility issues and now
I
realize that I did a mistake.

>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;

 I'd really like to rewrite my code to use
GMP in place of MAPM, but this work will require quite enough time.:
rewriting the code it is simple, but testing can be really hard (well,
if you want to do a really good job).
So, at the moment I think that:

>- 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.

are the possible solutions. Actually, there is another possible solution:
since the Yvy library can be compiled WITHOUT the MAPMX module
and the same is for Scicalc, i could simply and safely remove the dependancy
from
MAPM (even if this would mean one feature less for all the users).

>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.

Yes, i really could need this confirmation. Thanks a lot


    Ivano Primi

P.S.: Today I will contact the author of MAPM to know if he can agree a
license
change to make MAPM GPL-compatible.