[SciPy-dev] Scikits and stuff

[Anne Archibald]

On 28/12/2007, Travis E. Oliphant <oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
> All I'm saying that the distinction between the licenses that impose
> restrictions on what you do with your own code that depends on them and
> licenses that don't do that is important enough to warrant a name-space
> division.

I think this is the key point. You think there are lots of these
people, and they are important. Others think there are not many of
these people and making them work harder is fine.

I wonder if the difference of opinions is largely a difference of
ideas on what non-BSD licenses allow.

In particular, you talk about "restrictions on what you do with your own code".

My interpretation is that if I am writing some scientific code and I
want to work with numpy/scipy/scikits/what have you, I may do one of
two things:

* Write python code that simply imports some packages and uses
functions/classes from them.

* Extract and modify source code from the library to produce a version
of numpy/scipy/the scikit that can do more.

As I understand the notion of "derived work", the latter is a derived
work of the library and so the GPL (for example) forces me to release
my modifications unde the GPL. But (as I understand it), the former is
*not* a derived work of the scikit, and so my code can be under any
license I wish. Is this correct?

I realize there are packaging issues - if I want to make one tidy
exectuable that includes my code plus python plus all libraries I use
I may need to provide some source code. This does not seem unduly
troublesome.

Anne