make parmetis free [was: petsc interface to other packages]
On Tue, 2017-11-07 at 11:12 +0800, Drew Parsons wrote:
> On Mon, 2017-11-06 at 19:46 +0100, Matteo Semplice wrote:
> > Dear debian-science,
> >
> > I am writing some code based on the petsc libraries using a
> > stable
> > distribution but, if I create a PetscPartitioner of type
> > PETSCPARTITIONERPARMETIS (I have libparmetis-dev and
> > libparmetis4.0
> > installed) I get an error message at run-time asking me to "Please
> > reconfigure with --download-parmetis."
>
> Hi Matteo, you're caught by the inconvenient side effect of Debian's
> free software policy. Parmetis is non-free, "can be freely used ...
> by
> non-profit institutions...only", so it earns a second-class status in
> Debian (it's hosted, but not considered part of the official
> release).
It's just been brought to my attention that metis 5 is now free (Apache
2.0 licence).
parmetis 5 is currently under development. I don't know if they've
already made the decision to release the new parmetis under the same
free licence. But they're running a survey on parmetis 5 at
http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/metis/survey
If you're interested in parmetis then be sure to fill out the survey.
(and in particular encourage them to release it under the same free
licence now used for metis)
The parmetis home page is
http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/metis/parmetis/overview
Drew
Reply to: