I recently annotated the license list to give myself (and others) a quick-look grasp of the license situation:
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/d2ee85d1135fd801f1230530f39f05369f6384df I agree with Tony that in the short-term, distributing a GPL-free binary ourselves is not a priority, but pull requests to make the situation clearer or to make a GPL-free build simpler would be fine. For example, there could be a NO_GPL Makefile variable, and a macro on the Julia side to annotate and selectively exclude GPL stuff from the system image (FFTW and Rmath should be, respectively, easy and very easy to exclude, however I'm not sure how deeply entangled the SuiteSparse stuff is). On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Tony Kelman <[email protected]> wrote: > It's certainly a long-term goal. 0.4 is far enough behind-schedule already > that it's very unlikely to happen by then. Like most things in open source, > it's limited by available labor. People who want to see it happen will need > to help out if they want it to happen faster. For this particular issue of > GPL dependencies, the most useful places to contribute would be helping set > up BinDeps for the forked Rmath-julia library so it does not need to be > built by base and Distributions.jl can still work well and be easy to > install, and asking on the "New DFT API" pull request whether there are > specific areas where Steven Johnson needs help - likely answers are > benchmarking, conflict resolution to rebase to master, and setting up FFTW > as a package with automatic BinDeps etc. > > Removing things from Base has proven difficult to do smoothly, and while > it will be necessary to slim down the mandatory runtime dependencies for > embedding, static compilation, and less-restrictive licensing use cases, a > lot of work still needs to be done to figure out how to manage code > migrations in the least disruptive manner possible. I don't think this is > the primary concern of any core Julia developers or contributors at the > moment (in fact several people have said they would strongly prefer to not > remove any other code from Base until after 0.4.0 is released, and I agree > with that), but help and contributions are always welcome. > > > On Wednesday, April 15, 2015 at 6:51:44 AM UTC-7, Sebastian Good wrote: >> >> Is producing a non-GPL Julia build still on the radar? It might be a nice >> goal for the 0.4 release, even if we have to build it ourselves (e.g. >> against MKL, etc.) >> >> On Monday, April 21, 2014 at 5:00:47 PM UTC-4, Steven G. Johnson wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On Monday, April 21, 2014 4:40:38 PM UTC-4, Tobias Knopp wrote: >>>> >>>> Yes this is awesome work you have done there. Do you plan to implement >>>> the real-data FFT, DCT and DST in pure Julia also? Then one could really >>>> think about moving FFTW into a package. Hopefully its author is ok with >>>> that ;-) >>>> >>> >>> I plan to implement real-data FFTs, and move FFTW into a package. >>> >>> Pure-Julia DCT and DST are not in my immediate plans (they are a PITA to >>> do right because there are 16 types, of which 8 are common); my feeling is >>> that the need for these is uncommon enough that it's not terrible to have >>> these in a package instead of in Base. (Hadamard transforms and MDCTs >>> are also currently in packages.) >>> >>
