On Friday, May 1, 2015 at 12:10:32 AM UTC-4, Jeff Bezanson wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 5:26 PM, Scott Jones <[email protected]
> <javascript:>> wrote:
> > Maybe because it seems that a lot of the major packages have been put
> into
> > Base, so it isn't a problem, as MA Laforge pointed out, leading to Base
> > being incredibly large,
>
> That's absurd. There are 500 packages. We added Dates and...what else?
> We would like Base to be a bit smaller
> (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/5155), but "incredibly
> large" is a bit of an overstatement. It's *nothing* compared to
> matlab's default namespace for example.
>
1) Anything with a GPL license... that is really nasty to anybody would
like to use Julia on a commercial project...
(I have nothing against GPL, I do like OSS, but I much prefer the way
the MIT license works, and don't have the luxury of being able to use GPL
software in what I do for a living... [use in the sense of using a library,
if it's not under the LGPL]... I *use* a lot of GPL'ed software, Emacs,
gcc, ...)
2) multimedia.jl, linalg.jl, statistics.jl, sparse.jl
[fftw.jl, dsp.jl - I know these are also under my above GPL list, but if
a non-GPLed alternative is found, I still think it doesn't need to be in
"Julia-lite"]
quadgk.jl, profile.jl, Dates.jl
pkg.jl I'm not sure about... you'd need a way of loading it, to load other
packages, but... doesn't it use GPLed software, which could get people
using it into legal hot water?
I'm not sure about: reducedlm.jl, combinatorics.jl, don't know what they
do, or how basic their functionality is...
Also Markdown, I think there is a lot there that isn't needed just for
getting ? help documentation (or with @doc) at the terminal...
Anything not needed for @doc, I think should be optional, in a package.
> with stuff that means Julia's MIT license doesn't mean all that much,
> > because it includes GPL code by default...
>
> So the license of the entire compiler, runtime, and 90%+ of the
> standard library doesn't "mean much"? Ouch.
> In any case Viral started adding a flag to exclude GPL libs last week.
> The changes for that are tiny.
>
Yes, and I'm very grateful to Viral, because otherwise we'd probably have
had to totally stop planning on using Julia...
However, I feel that the developers should be very careful to not let GPL
get into the base distribution...
(I think the default for 0.4 release should be without the GPL encumbered
parts)
> I'm still confused about MongoDB vs. TokuMX. In your last post about
> them you mentioned using them as drop-in replacements for each other.
> But before that you said they are competitors, and won't necessarily
> implement the same interface. If they have incompatible interfaces,
> how can they be drop-in replacements? I don't get it.
>
Do you remember the lawsuits about Java vs. Microsoft's version of Java?
Or go look at the cringing README.md for the matlab compatibility package
for Julia...
Think about how AMD and Intel battled over extending the x86 instruction
set from 32-bits to 64...
Intel's approach was to introduce the Itanium chip... (real winner there!
;-) We called it the Titanium chip... going down like the Titanic!)
AMD went and extended the x86 instruction set... then Intel went back and
introduced a new instruction set that was mostly compatible with the AMD
64-bit instructions...
That is life outside of academia!
TokuMX recreated the MongoDB's API... but that doesn't mean that MongoDB's
developers are going to stop adding new things (sometimes precisely in an
attempt to lock people into using MongoDB, make it harder to switch to some
other platform), or that TokuMX hasn't added it's own new things.
I had a part in playing this sort of game for years... with multiple
vendors of an ANSI standard language, each adding their own extensions,
sometimes having those extensions copied by other competitors...
Scott
