[SciPy-dev] PRIMME: PReconditioned Iterative MultiMethod Eigensolver

[Travis Oliphant]

Robert Kern wrote:
> Matthew Brett wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>>     
>>> It is the same situation as with the umfpack solver (GPL) - I have
>>> written the wrappers which are included in scipy (they do not use any
>>> umfpack code, they just use information about its API) and added a check
>>> into distutils and a section into site.cfg file to see if umfpack is
>>> installed in the system.
>>>       
>> Well - the question was about the LGPL.  My reading of the license:
>>
>> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
>>
>> is that (under section 6) you are allowed to distribute an LGPL
>> library with non-derived code that links to it, as long as your own
>> license terms 'permit modification of [your] work for the customer's
>> own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications', and
>> that you provide (section 6a) the source code to the code linking to
>> the library and the library itself.
>>
>> If I read that correctly, it seems to me that an LGPL library can be
>> included with SciPy without SciPy needing to change its own license.
>>     
>
> The only reason that wrappers for FFTW and UMFPACK are allowed are because they 
> are optional. We need people to be able to "install scipy" without needing to 
> install *any* GPL or LGPL code even if the only code in our SVN repository is 
> just the BSD-licensed wrappers.
>
> If you want more wrappers for GPL or LGPL software, it's time to start the 
> scikits package. I'd really like to avoid more optional wrappers. It makes 
>   
It looks like David's PyAudio is a perfect thing to get this started 
since it is a "wrapper" to libsndfile which is LGPL.  

How should we proceed?  Can Robert set up a new SVN tree for scikits?  
Can I?  What kind of things should go into scikits.  How should they be 
installed -- under the scikits name-space (do we really like that name 
--- it sounds quirky to me)?

We have something to get started, let's do it.

-Travis