If you're not distributing Julia to anyone, then the GPL doesn't matter. If you are distributing Julia in some form, then it does matter and it will take some work and/or money to excise the GPL parts, which are FFTW, SUITESPARSE and RMath. Rmath is simple to remove since nothing in Julia itself depends on it – arguably, you don't even need to remove it since Julia is not actually a derived work of Rmath, we simply bundle the library. (If you use Distrubutions, however, then that program is a derived work and would have to be GPL; work is ongoing to remove the Rmath dependency.) It is possible to purchase commercial licenses for both FFTW and SUITESPARSE, but I don't know how much they cost.
On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Scott Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd like to use Julia for a commercial project, and need to know just what > we need to avoid to not have any problems with GPL. > I'd much rather use Julia than say Python or C++ for various parts of the > code, and have been having a great time learning/using Julia this last > month since I first learned about it, > and I'd hate to see this not be possible because of the GPL... (and I'm > not even using it for fancy math ;-), I just love its speed, extensibility, > ease of use with the REPL, and easy interface to C). > > Thanks, > Scott > > On Thursday, April 10, 2014 at 3:46:54 PM UTC-4, Tobias Knopp wrote: >> >> I think it helps to distinguish in the license discussion build >> dependencies and runtime dependencies. >> As far as I can see: >> - Core Julia, which consists of libjulia (statically linking libuv and >> llvm) and the repl, are MIT licensed >> - Base Julia has some GPL dependencies. But to get rid of them one just >> has to remove the shared library and of course not use the functionality. >> It seems only fftw and SuiteSparse are runtime GPL dependencies. >> >> >> Am Donnerstag, 10. April 2014 15:26:55 UTC+2 schrieb Jay Kickliter: >>> >>> There are bits and pieces in Github issues and posts, but can post a >>> definitive list of what needs to be replaced/removed to make Julia non GPL? >>> Will any functionality be missing? From what I understand I can use MKL for >>> some stuff. I've read that MKL has the ability to mimic FFTW, but will >>> Julia use that interface? >>> >>> For the record I'm not anti-GPL. I'd like to pitch Julia to my company >>> as alternative to Matlab and C++. But our customers can't accept a project >>> built with GPL. It's not a problem now, but I'm looking down the road when >>> Julia can be compiled in to executables. >>> >>
