Re: GSL within Public Domain Software

[Lowell Johnson <ldjohn at usgs dot gov>]

On Sat, 05 May 2001, Brian Gough wrote:
> > The question is, since our software is from the government (public domain),
> > what are the legalities of linking with a GPL'ed library? 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm one of the developer but I'm afraid I don't have the legal
> knowledge to give a definite answer here.
> 
> However, a lot of people at various government labs and agencies have
> dealt with this, and getting in touch with them will be the way to
> find out first-hand.  It is a general issue for any work on GPL'ed
> code by people working for the government.  There is certainly work
> based on GPL'ed code being released by people in ".gov", e.g.  NSA
> Secure Linux, so they would be one starting point, http://www.nsa.gov/selinux

Thanks.  I will try to track down specific examples that we can point to when
we discuss the issue with management.  I would love to find an official
government site that says that GPL'ing government software is OK under such and
such circumstances.  I doubt that such a site exists, but I'll see what I can
find.

My intuition tells me that, even if I find several examples of GPL'd government
software, the government officials will balk at even spending much time
discussing our situation --- primarily because there are alternative software
solutions.  The software alternatives may not be quite such a nice fit, but
they don't open up potential for higher level legal concerns.

In any case, I think that my work group needs to take these concerns to
management, if for no other reason than to foster the consideration of open
source software and its many benefits.

> One important point, I believe there is a difference between work done
> under contract to the government and work done by government
> employees.  If I understand correctly the public-domain rule only
> applies to the latter while the former is governed by the contract and
> can, in principle, use other licences if the contract is written to
> allow it.

Well, we are in a rather unique situation.  We are on a government contract
and located at the government site.  Everything except the personnel is
supplied by the government.  What you say is probably true, but I really
don't want to spend too much of my time trying to drive a change in the
licensing for our software (which has been released into the public domain for
many years).  If this was a new piece of software, I would give the licensing
more consideration.

> Let us know how you get on, if necessary I can look into it in more
> detail.
> 
> best regards
> Brian Gough

Thanks again.  I'll try to keep you posted, although I'll warn you now that I'm
notoriously bad at keeping contact on such things.

I do want to say that I am happy to see general numerical methods libraries,
written in C, showing up in open source.  Many of the pieces have been there
for years in such places as Netlib, but most are in Fortran which can be
problematic when trying to avoid mixing languages.  I hope the GSL continues to
evolve and gain support.  I would love to see an open source, fairly
complete, numerical methods library, whether it be GSL or another, achieve
status similar to that of LAPACK.

-- Lowell Johnson