Ok here’s my suggested course of action, inspired in part by the movie The Life 
of David Gale:

1) Apply for a grant to fund steps 2-5.
2) Make a BSD-licensed library that imports fftw
2b) (optional) sell the library for $500/license.
3) Convince the makers of FFTW to sue. We would pay all legal costs from (1)
4) Put *most* of the funds from (1) towards the defense legal costs, though.
5) Win the lawsuit, thereby creating the required legal precedent and providing 
a massive boost to the BSD-licensed SciPy ecosystem.

Any takers? ;)

Juan.

On 2 Nov 2017, 6:51 PM +1100, Stefan van der Walt <stef...@berkeley.edu>, wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 2, 2017, at 00:26, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> > The FSF is definitely guilty of oversimplifying this, but it's
> > probably best to think of their position as a simple bright-line rule
> > of thumb, like... if you follow this rule you're definitely safe, and
> > if you don't follow this rule... well, it's complicated and ultimately
> > it might depend on what the jury had for lunch that day, so good luck.
> > Or at least you should ask an actual lawyer :-)
>
> Should we not also ask: if we got sued, would an argument along the
> lines of "yes, I know you've explicitly stated publicly that you meant
> *this* with your license, but we prefer interpreting it like *that*"
> fly? I have no idea how courts interpret these things, but if a
> reasonable expectation was set, I can't see how ignoring it would
> benefit us.
>
> Until there's absolute clarity, or a confirmation from the authors or
> the FSF that importing FFTW is OK, I wouldn't go there.
>
> Stéfan
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