[AstroPy] Healpy

[Nathan Goldbaum]

Healpy, like the healpix library itself is licensed GPLv2, which is
incompatible with astropy's BSD license.

As far as I understand the GPL's linking clause, if astropy imported
healpy, the astropy package would need to be released under a GPLv2
license. Of course that doesn't stop anyone from making a GPL licensed
supplementary package that monkey patches astropy to include features from
healpy, but it can never be part of the main astropy distribution without
relicensing.

The healpix license was chosen a long time ago. I doubt they would have
predicted the dominance of non-copy left free software licenses
today. Given the current state of the scientific Python ecosystem (and
really scientific computing in general), healpix would likely get more
real-world use if it were relicensed. I'm sure that would be a lot of work
and would not only involve getting the appropriate people at NASA on board
but maybe also the original authors of healpix.

On Friday, October 2, 2015, Paul Kuin <npkuin at gmail.com> wrote:

> I second that.
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Emil Lenc <elenc at me.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','elenc at me.com');>> wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I was wondering if there were any plans to incorporate healpy (the python
>> interface to the HEALPIX library) into astropy? I often work between
>> HEALPIX and FITS format images and it would be really convenient to have
>> these two common formats available within the same package.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Emil.
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>>
>
>
>
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