John W. Eaton wrote:
For the licensing issue, I'd suggest packaging metis apart from pmetis and keeping a non-free version. You'll probably be able to get permission for that from the author.. The reason I'd suggest this is that the pmetis license is significantly more restrictive that the metis license...On 28-Sep-2005, folajimi wrote: | Pardon the interruption, but I was curious what METIS actually is. I found two | products that go by that name. There is METIS [1] This is the one that ufsparse depends on. | However, I found some correspondence on the issue of licensing that dates back | to June, 2001. The threads, [3] and [4] were initiated on a Debian mailing list | by Eray Ozkural. As far as I can tell, the issue was at an impasse over | legalese. Do you know what became of those efforts?| | (Please forgive me for rehashing the history; I was unclear about the status of| the issue of licensing.) I don't know any of the details, except that I think David Bateman has asked the original author to consider releasing the code under a GPL-compatible license. jwe
Compare http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/p/parmetis/parmetis_3.1-2/parmetis-test.copyright with http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/metis/metis/faq.html#distributeIn particular is the point on commerical applications, where metis can be used if it is a small component (which it definitely is with octave) while pmetis can only be used for "evaluation purposes" in a commerical context... I'd also suggest building two versions of ufsparse. One that depends on metis and one that doesn't (check -DNPARTITION flag of UFsparse) and let the person installing the software decide if they want to be completely free or not...
Regards David -- David Bateman David.Bateman@motorola.comMotorola Labs - Paris +33 1 69 35 48 04 (Ph) Parc Les Algorithmes, Commune de St Aubin +33 1 69 35 77 01 (Fax) 91193 Gif-Sur-Yvette FRANCE
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