[SciPy-dev] arpack wrapper status

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Aric Hagberg <hagberg@lanl.gov> wrote:

>
> I read through the threads related to including ARPACK in Debian
> and Fedora. The issue appears to be with the clause
>
> " . Written notification is provided to the developers of  intent to
>    use this software.  Also, we ask that use of ARPACK is properly
>    cited in any resulting publications or software documentation."
>
> which violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

I am surprised this is the only problematic part. I think the third
clause of their license as much of a problem:

"If you modify the source for these routines we ask that you change
the name of the routine and comment the changes made to the original."

It means that as it is, we are even breaking the license terms. I feel
a bit guilty, I wrongly assumed ARPACK was similar to LAPACK/BLAS, I
should have checked before doing changes to our internal copy of it.

David