clearing the use of a QP solver, and example code posted to a mailing list
Hello,
I am preparing a package for Siconos: http://siconos.gforge.inria.fr/
This software contains several 3rd-party sources used for numerical
solutions etc. All of these have been cleared as having a permissive
license with the exception of the QP solver, ql0001.f. As far as I
can tell this comes originally from
http://www.klaus-schittkowski.de/ql.htm and, therefore, it has a
non-DSFG license (free for educational use), which, as an upstream
contributor, I have documented here:
https://github.com/siconos/siconos/blob/master/externals/optim_misc/copyright
Now, due to this I have made sure that Siconos compiles and runs
without this file, but it implies significantly disabling the software
as the QP solver is important to its functionality. Given that this
code (ql0001.f) is just an updated (and slightly modified by Siconos
authors) version of the code found in Scilab [1], already packaged in
Debian, I am wondering whether it really needs to be removed from the
archive for the Siconos package to be DSFG-friendly. The authors of
Siconos consider it free specifically because it is already used by
Scilab, but I cannot tell whether the version in Scilab was released
under a different license. It is also hard to tell since the upstream
author does not host the source code as far as I can tell, but only a
usage example and a license.
[1] https://github.com/ScilabOrg/scilab/blob/master/scilab/modules/optimization/src/fortran/ql0001.f
Any advice would be appreciated.
A second issue: one header file [2] used in the project contains code
that was taken from a mailing list post [3] from 2008, and does not
have a license. However, it consists merely of a function
demonstrating how to use the lu_factorize function from BOOST uBLAS to
compute a determinant. Although I have emailed the original author,
it was posted many years ago, and I have not received a reply after a
few weeks. It seems silly to worry about a license for, basically,
example code posted to a list with the clear intention of being used,
but the function is not 100% trivial. Does fair use or something play
in here? How to deal with this?
[2] https://github.com/siconos/siconos/blob/master/externals/boost_contribs/determinant.hpp
[3] https://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2008/09/2983.php , file
attached to https://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2008/09/2984.php
kind regards,
Steve
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