[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 2.9.3

[David Bateman]

John W. Eaton wrote:

>On 28-Sep-2005, folajimi wrote:
>
>| Pardon the interruption, but I was curious what METIS actually is. I found two
>| products that go by that name. There is METIS [1]
>
>This is the one that ufsparse depends on.
>
>| 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.)
>
>I don't know any of the details, except that I think David Bateman has
>asked the original author to consider releasing the code under a
>GPL-compatible license.
>
>jwe
>
>  
>
For the licensing issue, I'd suggest packaging metis apart from pmetis 
and keeping a non-free version. You'll probably be able to get 
permission for that from the author.. The reason I'd suggest this is 
that the pmetis license is significantly more restrictive that the metis 
license...
Compare

http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/p/parmetis/parmetis_3.1-2/parmetis-test.copyright

with

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/metis/metis/faq.html#distribute

In particular is the point on commerical applications, where metis can 
be used if it is a small component (which it definitely is with octave) 
while pmetis can only be used for "evaluation purposes" in a commerical 
context... I'd also suggest building two versions of ufsparse. One that 
depends on metis and one that doesn't (check -DNPARTITION flag of 
UFsparse) and let the person installing the software decide if they want 
to be completely free or not...

Regards
David


-- 
David Bateman                                David.Bateman at motorola.com
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