[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 2.9.3

[folajimi]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 28-Sep-2005, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
>
> | * John W. Eaton <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu> [2005-09-28 14:17]:
> |
> | > OK.  There is one problem.  Cholmod from ufsparse requires METIS,
> | > which is distributed under terms that are not compatible with the GPL,
> | > so we won't be able to use it unless the license changes.  David
> | > Bateman has asked the author about licensing, but I don't know the
> | > outcome.
> |
> | Well, if the author does not change the license, either we don't use
> | METIS or Octave will have be excluded from Debian
>
> Maybe my message wasn't clear.  We can't use that part of ufsparse with
> Octave, whether in Debian or not.  I think the worst case is that we
> have to avoid the part of ufsparse that requires metis.
>
> jwe

Good day, Dr. Eaton:

Pardon the interruption, but I was curious what METIS actually is. I found two
products that go by that name. There is METIS [1] and then there is Metis [2].
However, I just found out that the latter is a [Microsoft] Windows-based
application, and, as such, is irrelevant to this conversation.

However, I found some correspondence on the issue of licensing that dates back
to June, 2001. The threads, [3] and [4] were initiated on a Debian mailing list
by Eray Ozkural. As far as I can tell, the issue was at an impasse over
legalese. Do you know what became of those efforts?

(Please forgive me for rehashing the history; I was unclear about the status of
the issue of licensing.)

Regards,
JA


[1] http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/metis/
[2] http://www.metis.no/
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-beowulf/2001/06/msg00077.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/10/msg02152.html