Re: Can we freely use AMOS in Octave?

[Dmitri A. Sergatskov]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Steven G. Johnson
<address@hidden> wrote:

> As an alternative, I am evaluating a package called COULCC (also written
> in the 1980s).  COULCC, like AMOS, was also posted without a copyright
> license, and later published in a journal (Computer Physics Communications, 
> CPC:
> see http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-4655(85)90025-6 ) that distributes
> code under a semi-free (non-commercial-use) license.  However, CPC (unlike
> ACM) explicitly says that authors retain the copyright on the code, and
> I was able to contact the COULCC author yesterday and graciously provided
> me with a version of his code under the MIT/X11 license.
>
> COULCC has some potential technical advantages over AMOS, separate from
> the legal questions.  It can evaluate Bessel functions of complex order
> in addition to complex arguments (AMOS only handles complex arguments
> and real orders), and has routines to compute J and Y simultaneously,
> as well as variants (modified Bessel functions, spherical Bessel
> functions, Hankel functions, exponentially scaled Bessel and Hankel
> functions, and Coulomb wavefunctions).
>
> (COULCC was originally written in Fortran 77, but the version I now have
> has been updated with a little bit of Fortran 90 code.  It probably
> requires a bit of work to make it convenient to call from C/C++, and is
> currently non-reentrant.)
>

It appears to me that COULCC is a part of the Fresco coide
http://www.fresco.org.uk/download.htm
with a FRES version available "for public distribution"
(I do not see an explicit licensing):

http://www.fresco.org.uk/source/fres-v29.html

> Steven
>

Dmitri.
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