On Tue, 23 Oct 2012, Derek Gaston wrote: > That brings me to another topic... we have other binary blobs in > libMesh... like tecio.a...
We've got like a hundred different tecio.a versions in there, but I thought that was the only blob. > Don't we have the same problems there? Yeah, we do. tecplot had to be stripped out for the libMesh package that's in Debian & Ubuntu, to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Hmm... I just became aware of one of my subconscious motivations for wanting fparser source distributed: I've been thinking about helping the Debian people update their libMesh dpkg sometime after the autotools merge (their version is more than a year old now), and I wanted one fewer worry licensing-wise about getting new features into the Debian repos. With Tecplot we don't even have the option of making source code available, pure-GPL app developers would have to distribute a tecplot-disabled binary regardless, and so our only choice is "Tecplot for non-GPL apps" vs "no Tecplot for anyone". If we were going to be that purist we might as well switch from the LGPL to the GPL ourselves. Plus, with Tecplot I just don't care. :-) I stopped using it myself a while ago, Exodus->Paraview is a great substitute, and our viz MeshOutput is abstracted enough that it's easy to switch options anyway. But I could see myself becoming very dependent on fparser, so if there had been any chance that one day we might have to disassemble those .inc files in order to fix some newly-triggered bug or compatibility issue, I'd have ripped it out and put a less read-only parser package in it's place already. There's some other non-free-software in contrib/... nothing as blatant as a binary blob, but one of these days we probably ought to create a contrib-free directory and a --enable-lgpl-only configure option so that nobody trying to build commercial apps on top of libMesh sabotages themselves. libHilbert is GPL; Laspack's, Triangle's and Tetgen's licenses are free for non-commercial use only; and for ParMETIS, Ben got special permission to redistribute but not permission to give others permission to redistribute... Huh. I just noticed that we now have both GPL and GPL-incompatible licenses in contrib/. We should still be fine redistributing it all together in source form, but doing ./configure without either "--disable-libHilbert" or "--disable-laspack --disable-triangle --disable-tecplot --disable-tetgen --disable-metis --disable-parmetis" will eventually give you personal-use-only binaries. As if fixing our libHilbert issues wasn't already a high enough priority... --- Roy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ Libmesh-devel mailing list Libmesh-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/libmesh-devel
