[AstroPy] Healpy

[Nathan Goldbaum]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 2:46 AM, Thomas Robitaille <
thomas.robitaille at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Emil,
>
> The 'reproject' Astropy-affiliated package provides a way to easily
> reproject images using Healpy in addition to astropy.wcs:
>
> http://reproject.readthedocs.org/en/stable/
>
> The functionality with Healpy is optional, so the package is normally
> BSD-licensed, but if you do install Healpy, then as indicated here:
>
> http://reproject.readthedocs.org/en/stable/healpix.html
>
> you have to abide by the GPL license instead.
>

Hi Tom,

I don't want to stir up any problems for you, but I don't understand how
this works legally.

You're distributing code that imports healpy. Even if it's "optional"
functionality, the code that imports healpy is being distributed under a
BSD license. As far as I understand it, the intent of the user doesn't
matter for the licensing, all that matters is the license the code is
distributed under.

I'd strongly urge you to contact e.g. debian-legal or the software freedom
conservancy about this to get an opinion from an expert. I suspect your
only legal recourses here are either to no longer import healpy in the
reproject package or relicense reproject under a GPLv2 compatible license.

-Nathan


> Cheers,
> Tom
>
> Emil Lenc wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I was wondering if there were any plans to incorporate healpy (the
> python interface to the HEALPIX library) into astropy? I often work between
> HEALPIX and FITS format images and it would be really convenient to have
> these two common formats available within the same package.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Emil.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > AstroPy at scipy.org
> > https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/astropy
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