[SciPy-Dev] Determining License for fortran inclusion in SciPy

[Ralf Gommers]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 6:12 AM Sam Wallan <samwallan at icloud.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
>
>
> We are working to add support for the Tukey-Kramer statistical test, and
> it relies upon an involved computation of the critical values of the
> Studentized Range, for which a Fortran routine has been published. Using
> this Fortran would be much quicker in terms of development and likely
> quicker in computation than our best Python implementation.
>
>
>
> The code is published in a journal article, but I'm not sure if that means
> that the code is publicly available, or what license or copyright might be
> retained. I have contacted one of the original authors to ask him about it
> and am awaiting a response. The paper the code is in is available from
> JSTOR, and the raw code is available in various places
> <http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/math/statlib/apstat/190> on the internet both
> in original form and sometimes with improvements.
>

What you need here is permission to distribute this code under the BSD
license SciPy uses (or another compatible license) from the copyright
holder. I didn't check, but most likely JSTOR holds the copyright and not
the original authors. If that's the case, you'll need permission from the
journal. We've had multiple cases of this in the past where we did receive
such permission, IIRC from ACM journals.

Cheers,
Ralf


>
> Algorithm AS 190: Probabilities and Upper Quantiles for the Studentized
> Range  <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2347300?seq=1>
>
> R. E. Lund and J. R. Lund
>
> Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series C (Applied Statistics)
>
> Vol. 32, No. 2 (1983), pp. 204-210 (7 pages)
>
> Published By: Wiley
>
> DOI: 10.2307/2347300
>
>
>
> In SciPy there is already use of several algorithms also published by Journal
> of the Royal Statistical Society (these can also be found on JSTOR). In git
> history I see they were added some 18 years ago:
>
>    - PRHO: Algorithm AS 89  Appl. Statist. (1975) Vol.24, No. 3, P377 in
>    scipy/stats/statlib/spearman.f
>    - POLY: ALGORITHM AS 181.2   APPL. STATIST.  (1982) VOL. 31, NO. 2 in
>    scipy/stats/statlib/swilk.f
>
>
>
> I’ve investigated online for other licensed use of these algorithms, but I
> have not seen anything concrete. I closest use I was able to find is a
> direct translation of the algorithm
> <https://foundry.sandia.gov/releases/latest/javadoc-api/gov/sandia/cognition/statistics/distribution/StudentizedRangeDistribution.APStat.html> we
> are interested in, AS 190, to Java by Sandia National Laboratories, which "is
> released under the open source BSD License.” <https://foundry.sandia.gov/>
>
>
>
>
> Does anyone have experience with this source or insight into whether the
> inclusion of this Fortran in SciPy is fair game?
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Sam Wallan
>
>
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