On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 4:28 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
On 30 Oct 2014 11:12, "Sturla Molden" <sturla.molden@gmail.com> wrote:
Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
[*] Actually, we could, but the binaries would be tainted with a viral license.
And binaries linked with MKL are tainted by a proprietary license... They have very similar effects,
The MKL license is proprietary but not viral.
If you like, but I think you are getting confused by the vividness of anti-GPL rhetoric. GPL and proprietary software are identical in that you have to pay some price if you want to legally redistribute derivative works (e.g. numpy + MKL/FFTW + other software). For proprietary software the price is money and other random more or less onerous conditions (e.g. anti-benchmarking and anti-reverse-engineering clauses are common). For GPL software the price is that you have to let people reuse your source code for free. That's literally all that "viral" means.
I wrote a summary of the MKL license problems here: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/wiki/Numerical-software-on-Windows#blas--lapa... In summary, if you distribute something with the MKL you have to: * require your users to agree to a license forbidding them from reverse-engineering the MKL * indemnify Intel against being sued as a result of using MKL in your binaries I think the users are not allowed to further distribute any part of the MKL libraries, but I am happy to be corrected on that. Cheers, Matthew