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WISDEM / WEIS

Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-controls Toolset
https://weis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Apache License 2.0
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Streamline the compilation of XFoil #1

Closed johnjasa closed 2 years ago

johnjasa commented 4 years ago

We cannot include XFoil directly in WEIS due to the GPL license.

nikhar-abbas commented 3 years ago

This is a little bit out of my realm so I'm not sure exactly how this would work but there is a version of xfoil available on conda-forge. I presume we might need to change some aspects of how we call xfoil, but it might be cleaner in the long run.

https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/libxfoil

Source code: https://github.com/montagdude/libxfoil

gbarter commented 3 years ago

That repo is a great find. Here I had a whole detailed step-by-step guide on how to compile XFoil and write text-based input scripts when that repo is such a great find.

The only problem is the licensing. As a GPL code, if we do anything that says import xfoil then our code will also have to be GPL according to the NREL lawyers. They say that it has to be separately distributed, compiled, and executed via a system call (manual or automated). I know the difference between the wrappers is semantics, but that is how they draw the line.