Re: Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA) for octave?

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 26 August 2010 08:41, Giorgio Dall'Olmo <address@hidden> wrote:
> The author of the code posts on his website the link to the asamin
> function, so I guess that he would be ok if there was also an octave
> version of it...

Maybe he would be, but his licensing terms say otherwise. The
advertising clauses in the license terms adds an additional
restriction that the GPL doesn't have. Perhaps he would be willing to
change or clarify his licensing terms. As you are no doubt aware,
Octave is distributed under the GPL and this means that any code that
gets distributed as part of Octave needs to be GPL compatible.
Octave-forge *might* be able to distribute the
problematically-licensed code, but I don't think we should encourage
distribution of GPL-incompatible code along with Octave.

If that fails, he does seem gracious enough to describe his algorithm
in full detail in his published papers, so a full independent
implementation could be possible for someone industrious enough.
Kindly asking the author for a clarification or a relicensing should
be first, though. Dropping clauses 4 and 5 should be enough. The
disclaimer also has to be prominent for legal matters, and the usual
way of doing this is SHOUTY CAPS, so that should probably also be
changed. I think this isn't a concern for Octave, though.

In the author's defense, he seems to have mimicked the original
4-clause BSD license that was in vogue when he first wrote the
software, but even BSD dropped the advertising clauses in 1999. We
could suggest to the author that his licensing terms just need an
update.

- Jordi G. H.