Re: GPU Engine for Octave

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Judd Storrs <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Jaroslav Hajek <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I believe this means a free software or public domain implementation,
>> but not necessarily GPL'ed.
>
> I guess I was wondering if the wording was carefully chosen such that
> perhaps GPLv3-incompatible but still free-software could be used but
> only in this case in order to avoid wasting effort developing
> competing free implementations of standard interfaces. It seems like
> the license could easily have been explicit that a GPLv3-compatible
> alternative must be available before any proprietary libraries could
> be used. It just struck me as odd that they choose to be somewhat
> ambiguous here.
>
> (Annoying observation: is BLAS/LAPACK the product of a recognized
> standards body?)
>

LAPACK is a software, not a standard. BLAS is both a software and a
de-facto standard, for which many implementations exist.
Even though it's not a formal standard, it's certainly "widely used
amongst developers", so it qualifies for the GPL.
There is also the advanced "BLAS technical forum" standard, but I
don't know whether there is a complete implementation at all.

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz