[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#435214: Bug#435214: Clarification of licensing terms of semidef-oct

[Stephen Boyd]

rafael,

i am happy to switch the license to GNU, but of course we have to check 
with lieven.  as a coincidence i will see lieven tomorrow, when we can 
send the final confirmation.

however, it should be noted that semideg_prog is really quite old, and 
there are now far more recent solvers available for semidefinite 
programming.  i have not used semidef_prog for many years now.  i don't 
know which solver is best for linking to octave.

i (and many others too) do most of my day to day convex optimization 
work using cvx, which has a GNU license, but unfortunately, runs on top 
of matlab.  our plan (hope? goal?) however is to develop a full GNU 
system for modeling and solving convex optimization problems.  lieven's 
CVXOPT is a good start along these lines, but i am not sure how easy or 
hard it is to tie python/C into octave.  if you are interested in 
optimization software for octave, i'd be happy to chat; maybe we can 
help (beyond changing the license on ancient, but working, software to GNU).

stephen


Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> I am one of the members of the Debian Octave Group [1], which maintains the
> Octave-related packages for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.  Your
> semidef_prog software, which was ported to Octave by A. S. Hodel, has been
> packaged for Debian [2] since 1998.
>
> Only recently, it has been brought to our attention [3] the fact that the
> license terms in the semidef_prog's README file are incompatible with the 
> Debian Free Software Guidelines [4].  At least, the phrase "distribute this
> software for any purpose without fee" is ambiguous.
>
> Unless the license terms are clarified or they are switched to some standard
> license language (like MIT/X11 or GPL), we will be forced to removed the
> package from Debian, which would be a pity for our users.
>
> Just FYI, the semidef_prog software seem sto work correctly with the latest
> version of Octave (2.9.13).
>
> [1] http://pkg-octave.alioth.debian.org/
> [2] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/octave-sp
> [3] http://bugs.debian.org/435214
> [4] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
>
> (Please, respect the Reply-To header, in order to keep the discussion
> recorded in our Bug Tracking System.  Thanks.)
>
> Best regards,
>
>