[SciPy-dev] requesting feedback on/editing of scikits wiki-page

[Jarrod Millman]

On 5/16/07, David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> One thing which may need to be changed is the license requirement. I
> thought one of the point of scikits was to include code useful for scipy
> community, but which cannot be licensed to BDS/MIT. For example,
> including GPL code, or package which depends on LGPL libraries.
> malabwrap for that matter depends on proprietary libraries to work...

Thanks to Alex for putting together this information.  I don't have
the time to respond to all his points/questions, but I wanted to
quickly respond to David's comments about licensing.

Originally, I assumed that *all* the scikit code would be released
under the same license (ie.,  the revised BSD license like all the
rest of scipy).  That would certainly be my preference.  My
understanding was that the basic idea behind scikits was simply to
provide a modular mechanism for distributing "scipy" packages under
one namespace.

There are several arguments for using the same license for all the
packages.  First, I think that it would confusing for users importing
"from scikits import foo, bar" to find that foo is released under one
license and bar is released under another.  Second while we want to
keep dependencies between scikits packages to a minimum, there will
inevitably be a need for code from one package to be used in another.
This may lead to code duplication if the needed functionality already
exists in a scikit's package, but is released under the GPL when BSD
code is needed.  Third, it is reasonable to imagine that at some
point, someone will want to refactor the various scikit's packages.
During a major refactoring, it may be desirable to move code from one
package to another or even from scikits to scipy.  This will be
difficult if it is necessary to keep track of what license each piece
of code is released under.

Basically, I think that opening up the possibility for each package to
be released under its own license is going to make it difficult to
maintain some unity to the scipy namespace.  I also don't know whether
there is a need to include non-BSD code in the scikit's namespace.  We
could easily create links to non-BSD code on the wikipages or even
create a new namespace for code released under different licenses.  I
would be very interested to hear arguments for why non-BSD code needs
to be available under the scikit's namespace.

Thanks,

-- 
Jarrod Millman
Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
phone: 510.643.4014
http://cirl.berkeley.edu/