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Clarify SLSQP license status (Trac #1056) #1583

Closed scipy-gitbot closed 11 years ago

scipy-gitbot commented 11 years ago

Original ticket http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/1056 on 2009-11-17 by trac user stevenj, assigned to unknown.

I was looking at the SLSQP code (nonlinear optimization) that is included in SciPy, and I'm concerned because I can't find any evidence that this code is available under a free/open-source license.

The source code itself (slsqp_optmz.f) lists it as copyrighted (Copyright 1991: Dieter Kraft, FHM) but gives no license. The code was published in two places, as far as I can tell: in a 1988 technical report ("A Software Package for Sequential Quadratic Programming") and as part of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Algorithm 733 (downloadable from Netlib at http://www.netlib.org/toms/733) in 1991.

I can't find any evidence that the original technical report was published under any kind of free/open-source license (this would have been very unusual in 1988!). ACM Trans. Math. Soft. code is definitely NOT free software: it falls under the ACM Software copyright (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice) which is free-of-charge only for noncommercial use.

Don't get me wrong, I would love for this to be free/open-source software (I'd like to use it in my own code, which is why I was looking into this). But in the absence of a clear license, as you probably know, the default under copyright law is no permission, and certainly not permission to redistribute under a free/open-source license.

scipy-gitbot commented 11 years ago

@pv wrote on 2009-11-19

Thanks for the notice. Of course licenses are a high priority for us!

It seems this code was added in cfa7c92 -- I'll ask those involved about licences.

scipy-gitbot commented 11 years ago

@pv wrote on 2009-11-19

We obtained a permission from ACM to include TOMS 733 in Scipy under the BSD license. I added a notice about this at the top of the source file in f0f2715.

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.scientific.devel/6725

If you notice more files with dubious license issues, please file more bug reports -- I think that there are some other instances of code re-released under BSD upon request, but I'm not sure all of them are marked.

scipy-gitbot commented 11 years ago

Title changed from slsqp is not free/open-source software? to Clarify SLSQP license status by @pv on 2009-11-19