Hi, I am interested in getting slicot [1] into Debian. Slicot is a Fortran library implementing numerical algorithms for computations in systems and control theory. It is licensed under the GPL (actually it is dual-licensed because the library is also incorporated in some nonfree MATLAB toolbox). Parts of the library are already used in the scilab and octave-control packages. The upcoming release of dynare will also use slicot. At least 3 packages are therefore going to contain embedded copies of (parts of) the library, which is not a good thing. I therefore volunteer to package it, possibly under the umbrella of the Debian Science team. Note that the slicot website states that the source of the library is no longer downloadable (they say they are going to reorganize the licensing…), but there is still a working download link [2]. I intend to contact them to see if they plan to move away from the GPL in future releases. In the worst case, if they go nonfree, this means that it could become unmaintained (at least from our point of view). Do you have any comments/ideas before I start hacking? Best, [1] http://www.slicot.org [2] http://www.slicot.org/shared/slicot.tar.gz -- Sébastien Villemot Researcher in Economics & Debian Maintainer http://www.dynare.org/sebastien Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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