[SciPy-dev] Brent's Principal Axis Algorithm

[Benny Malengier]

2009/9/9 Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 23:34, Sturla Molden<sturla at molden.no> wrote:
>> Robert Kern skrev:
>>> That would be great! Unfortunately, there is no license attached to
>>> praxis.f, so it cannot be integrated into scipy until we find a
>>> suitably licensed implementation of the algorithm.
>>>
>> I am not a lawyer, but --- I'd say if someone puts his own code on the
>> netlib repository for free download, without even making a copyright
>> notice, it can be seen as public domain.
>
> That is entirely contrary to copyright law. Since the Berne Convetion
> in 1973, works are copyrighted at the moment of creation. One does not
> need to specify that it is copyrighted. In order for you to distribute
> it, the author must explicitly give you a license. Silence does not
> imply consent.

To return to the original question, yes, it would be great if this
could be included in scipy optimize.
If it needs to be rewritten, if somebody makes a clean description of
how to do it by looking at the code, I'm sure some people would be
willing to reimplement it in C for scipy.
If Brent indicates the code is GPL, you can write a scikit that
extends scipy.optimize to offer this, as inclusion in scipy is not
possible, but I'm not sure GPL code really means all should be cleanly
reimplemented so as to allow inclusion in scipy. (GPL can use BSD code
after all, so the scikit would be GPL and independant).

Benny