Scientific Libraries in Python

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

Horatio Davis <horatio at qpsf.edu.au> wrote in message news:<mailman.1006691016.32620.python-list at python.org>...

[snip]

> VTK (Martin et al) - 3D visualization on GTK - personal copyright

Well, I guess that is a typo but FWIW I'd like to mention that VTK
does not depend on GTK and does not use it at all.  There is a pyGTK
widget that can embed a VTK render window but that is a different
issue.

Thanks for the compliments on MayaVi. :)

[snip]

> Now... licensing. While the top two projects are both less...restrictive,
> I reluctantly have to concede that these lists have an awful lot of GPL
> code that would be difficult or impossible to do without. The eventual
> license, therefore, looks like GPL or (if we're lucky) LGPL. I can even
> live with that if it'll get me a coherent scientific library, but others
> might have a different viewpoint. What would those viewpoints be?

As regards the MayaVi license, MayaVi was developed for the community
so I didn't want someone to take the MayaVi codebase, use it for their
own purposes and not give back anything in terms of code to the
community.  That is why I chose the GPL.  However, the GPL does force
everyone else who links to it to be GPL.  I guess LGPL might also work
but I really don't know.  I'll try to give it some thought.  Anyway, I
am not sure you want to put all packages into one huge super package. 
It would be a nightmare to package/distribute!  I'd really pity the
person who'd have to maintain such a beast.
prabhu

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