Another factor that complicates things is open source philosophy and the licenses that go with it. The GSL project looks very promising, and the ultimate goals of that project appear to be to create a coherent and complete numerical library. This kind of thing NEEDS to be open source, and the GSL folks have chosen a license (GPL) that guarantees that it remains that way. That is a good thing. The license also make it impossible to use the library in closed source projects, which is a deal killer for a lot of people, but it is also an important attribute for many folks that don't think there should be closed source projects at all. I believe that that will greatly stifle the potential of the project, but it fits with the philosophy iof it's creators. Personally I think the LGPL would have guaranteed the future openness of the source, and allowed a much greater user (and therefor contributer) base. BTW, IANAL either, but my reading of the GPL and Python's "GPL compatable" license, is that GSL could be used with Python, but the result would have to be released under the GPL. That means it could not be imbedded in a closed source project. As a rule, Python itself and most of the libraries I have seen for it (Numeric, wxPython, etc.) are released under licences that allow propriatary use, so we probably don't want to make Numeric, or SciPy GPL. too bad. On another note, it looks like the blitz++ library might be a good basis for a general Numerical library (and NumPy 3) as well. It does come with a flexible license. Any thoughts? -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. ChrisHBarker@home.net --- --- --- http://members.home.net/barkerlohmann ---@@ -----@@ -----@@ ------@@@ ------@@@ ------@@@ Oil Spill Modeling ------ @ ------ @ ------ @ Water Resources Engineering ------- --------- -------- Coastal and Fluvial Hydrodynamics -------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------