On Oct 27, 2016 8:42 AM, "Robert McLeod" <robbmcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Releasing NumPy under GPL would make it incompatible with SciPy, which may be _slightly_ inconvenient to the scientific Python community: > > https://scipy.github.io/old-wiki/pages/License_Compatibility.html > > https://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2013-August/019149.html
There's 0 chance that numpy is going to switch to the GPL in general, so please don't panic. Also, you're misunderstanding license compatibility, so let's back up a step :-). The discussion was about whether numpy might potentially, at some unspecified future date, be available with *optional* GPL code. A numpy build with optional GPL bits included would be similar to how the numpy builds that many people use which that are linked to MKL, and thus subject to MKL's license terms. In both cases the license is no longer numpy's regular bsd, but has these extra bits added. Neither changes the availability of bsd-licensed numpy; they just give another option. And, both numpy+GPL-bits and numpy+MKL-bits are/would be license *compatible* with scipy in the sense that matters to end users: you can absolutely use and distribute numpy+(pick one of the above)+scipy together, and the licenses are happy to allow that. The sense in which they're both *in*compatible with scipy is just that if you want to *add code to scipy itself*, then that code can't be GPL like pyfftw, or proprietary like MKL, because the scipy devs have decided that they don't want to allow that. That's a decision they've made for good reasons, but it isn't a legal inevitability, and it doesn't stop *you* from using and distributing scipy and GPL code together, or scipy and proprietary code together. (The real license incompatibility is between GPL and proprietary. Either one can be mixed with BSD, but they can't be mixed with each other and then distributed. Ever notice how Anaconda doesn't provide pyfftw? They can't legally ship both MKL and pyfftw, and they picked MKL. Even then, though, this license restriction only applies to software distributors: if you as an end user go and install MKL and pyfftw together in the privacy of your own cluster, then that's also totally legal.) -n
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