Hello, I am preparing a package for Siconos: http://siconos.gforge.inria.fr/
This software contains several 3rd-party sources used for numerical solutions etc. All of these have been cleared as having a permissive license with the exception of the QP solver, ql0001.f. As far as I can tell this comes originally from http://www.klaus-schittkowski.de/ql.htm and, therefore, it has a non-DSFG license (free for educational use), which, as an upstream contributor, I have documented here: https://github.com/siconos/siconos/blob/master/externals/optim_misc/copyright Now, due to this I have made sure that Siconos compiles and runs without this file, but it implies significantly disabling the software as the QP solver is important to its functionality. Given that this code (ql0001.f) is just an updated (and slightly modified by Siconos authors) version of the code found in Scilab [1], already packaged in Debian, I am wondering whether it really needs to be removed from the archive for the Siconos package to be DSFG-friendly. The authors of Siconos consider it free specifically because it is already used by Scilab, but I cannot tell whether the version in Scilab was released under a different license. It is also hard to tell since the upstream author does not host the source code as far as I can tell, but only a usage example and a license. [1] https://github.com/ScilabOrg/scilab/blob/master/scilab/modules/optimization/src/fortran/ql0001.f Any advice would be appreciated. A second issue: one header file [2] used in the project contains code that was taken from a mailing list post [3] from 2008, and does not have a license. However, it consists merely of a function demonstrating how to use the lu_factorize function from BOOST uBLAS to compute a determinant. Although I have emailed the original author, it was posted many years ago, and I have not received a reply after a few weeks. It seems silly to worry about a license for, basically, example code posted to a list with the clear intention of being used, but the function is not 100% trivial. Does fair use or something play in here? How to deal with this? [2] https://github.com/siconos/siconos/blob/master/externals/boost_contribs/determinant.hpp [3] https://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2008/09/2983.php , file attached to https://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2008/09/2984.php kind regards, Steve
