On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 12:41 AM, Phil Steitz wrote:
--- robert burrell donkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<snip>
it seems to me that brent is assuring us that he went back to the
mathematical basis of the algorithm and started from that. a clean
implementation based on the mathematics should not infringe the copyright
nor is it ethically dubious (providing that the correct credits for the
original mathematics are provided if that's possible). what we need to
think about is how we can demonstrate this to everybody's satisfaction.
the openness of the ASF is one of it's great strengths and there should be
some way we can show the right way to develop new implementations. (of
course, we need to work out what that is first ;)
From Brent's notes on the gamma function implementations, I at least am
convinced that his implementation was developed from the math, not the NR
algorithm or code. The dodgy bit is that someone else who did the same
derivation and ended up with a similar implementation (e.g. NR) might claim
ownership of the algorithm itself. This is why the limitation expressed in the
NR copyright statement is important.
definitely. i think that there are two important lessons here.
the first that brent was right in the way that he went about demonstration that he developed his implementation from the mathematics. we should probably think about asking for mathematical descriptions of the algorithms so addition to the developers manual
Have you had a chance to look at the draft developer's guidelines that I started and submitted here:
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20404
We could add a note on this to the section called "documentation".
if these are not available on the web then we should make efforts (as brent did) to create some notes and add them to the developers guide.
I agree. I think that the best approach will be to include full descriptions of mathematical algorithms not available on the web using links in the javadoc to the commons-math developers/users guide.
the second is that we're going to need to audit our implementations against copyrighted ones. (i'm hoping that some better qualified folks might volunteer for this.) if we find any that are too similar, then we should use apache development resources to create fresh clean room implementations.
I don't understand exactly what you mean here. It might be difficult to find people with the combined legal and math skills to "audit" the code for copyright infringement. What did you have in mind here?
i believe that providing new implementation from the basic mathematics is
what commons-math should do. there is no real reason why we should start
from existing code. if we can't, then maybe that's a sign that we're
moving away from our aims.
The one exception to this is obviously existing code that is owned by the
contributor. Even in this case, however, refactoring will usually be required
(certainly has been for me :-)).
maybe 'clean and original implementations created by commons-math developers' was probably closer to what i wanted to say than 'new implementations'.
- robert
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