Re: lapack license

[Patrick Alken <patrick dot alken at colorado dot edu>]

Hi again,

  After reviewing the BSD licenses, it appears that the lapack
license is identical to the "modified BSD" license, which is
compatible with the GPL according to www.gnu.org.

  To comply with lapack's license, it seems we need to include
a copy of it with GSL though, since eigen/nonsymmv.c and
eigen/schur.c contain a few lapack routines.

Patrick Alken

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 10:16:27AM -0700, Patrick Alken wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   I noticed that the recent release of lapack 3.1.0 contains a
> license file (finally) which was never present in any previous
> lapack release. Since there have been discussions on this list
> in the past of the fuzzy lapack licensing issues, here is the
> license:
> 
> --- snip ---
> 
> Copyright (c) 1992-2006 The University of Tennessee.  All rights
> reserved.
> 
> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without 
> modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
> met:
> 
> - Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
>   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 
>   
> - Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
>   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer listed
>   in this license in the documentation and/or other materials
>   provided with the distribution.
>   
> - Neither the name of the copyright holders nor the names of its
>   contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
>   this software without specific prior written permission.
> 
> --- snip ---
> 
> I'm not an expert on free software licenses, but it looks like this
> is similar to the original BSD license due to the "copyright notice
> must be preserved" clause. Perhaps some more knowledgeable people
> can comment on whether this is compatible with the GPL, since some of
> the recent nonsymmetric eigenvalue code added to gsl was ported from
> lapack. Mainly this would affect the eigenvector solver...most of
> the eigenvalue code is not from lapack (i think there was just 1
> routine which could probably be re-written).
> 
> Patrick Alken
>