Re: Re: Slicot in Debian
> Hi,
>
> I'm the author of the Octave control package and came across this thread coincidentally. I'm a bit worried about the future of my work if Slicot should go nonfree. I propose to join our efforts and create a free fork of Slicot 5.0 if the need should arise. Debian, Octave and Scilab developers already do the same for Arpack [1].
>
> Best regards,
> Lukas
>
> [1]
>
> http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng/
>
> I exchanged private emails with the Slicot developers and indeed they
> confirmed that future releases of Slicot will be under a nonfree license
> (my understanding is that academic usage will not be restricted but
> commercial usage will be forbidden unless one buys a commercial
> license).
>
> Creating a fork would be the ideal solution (and actually the only
> sustainable one on the long term, at least for bugfixes). I don't know
> if we will have enough resources, but the Arpack example is indeed an
> encouraging example.
>
> Also note I intend to create the Debian Slicot package at some point
> after the Debian Wheezy freeze.
>
> Best,
>
> --
> Sébastien Villemot
> Researcher in Economics & Debian Maintainer
>
> http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
>
> Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
> As the main coordinator of arpack-ng, I would be also volunteer for such
> task (slicot-ng).
>
> Sylvestre
>
>
Hi Sylvestre
I would like to "bump" this thread [1] from mid-2012 about creating a free fork of SLICOT, which has finally gone from GPLv3 to non-free a few months ago (version 5.5). What do you think about a joint effort between Debian, GNU Octave and Scilab to maintain a free fork, based on SLICOT 5.0, similar to arpack-ng [2] ?
Best regards,
Lukas
PS: My co-author of the control package, Thomas Vasileiou, has already a few patches.
[1]
https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2012/06/msg00154.html
[2]
http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng/
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