Initially, our software would just be available as a service, and I do understand that that won't be a problem with the GPL, however, later on, it could be that we'd want to set up a server at a customer site or on customer hardware... which would probably count as "distribution"... I don't think we need any of FFTW, SUITESPARSE, or RMATH anyway... Julia is such a nice language, for lots of things besides just math & science, it *really* would be great to have a version of Julia with any GPL stuff as packages... as Sebastian Good just suggested..
Right now, it seems to be the main obstacle to using the language for lots of things... Thanks, Scott On Friday, April 17, 2015 at 10:36:26 AM UTC-4, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > 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 <scott.pa...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> 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. >>>> >>> >
