Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom + High Energy Physics

[C Y]

--- "Andrey G. Grozin" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Right. Taken together, these libraries can be a good substitute for
> the  NAG library which could be used from the commercial Axiom. It 
> would be great to be able to do efficient numeric calculations 
> inside a larger Axiom program, using these 3 excellent libraries.

Hmm.  Actually, we might even be able to use the documentation for the
NAG libraries to do a feature for feature comparison, and working off
of these libraries add in whatever we need to achieve feature parity
(although probably not, at least right away, performance parity.)

> There is a tricky point, however. GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is
> licensed under GPL (not LGPL). Therefore, Axiom linked with GSL 
> (either statically or dynamically) is automatically under GPL. A 
> historical example: the author of CLISP was forced (by RMS) to 
> change its license to GPL, because it uses readline. This was my 
> argument when I advocated using GPL for Axiom in the beginning of
> the project.

I'll have to look at GSL more carefully.  Depending on how extensive it
really is, perhaps using the documentation
(http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/gsl-ref_toc.html) and papers
describing the original ideas as a guide for implementing the
functionality in Axiom itself is a viable way to go - we also get a
literate document by default, that way.  I know GSL is fairly extensive
in its coverage but I don't know how difficult the ideas are to
implement - once we have a design outlined and features we want
identified from GSL, NAG, and any other relevant libraries it might be
a fairly smooth process.  I'd really rather not get into the whole GPL
wrangle again, and from the 30 year horizon perspective it might be
better to focus on finding desirable features and implementing them in
Axiom, rather than risk another 100 emails on licensing issues.

Cheers,
CY


                
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