[AstroPy] Healpy

[Perry Greenfield]

Not if the functionality is essential to the package (at least from what I understand). I’ll see if I can dig that aspect of the license that specifically mentions it (or legal discussion around it).

Cheers, Perry

On Oct 5, 2015, at 12:30 PM, Wolfgang Kerzendorf <wkerzendorf at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is very off topic:
> 
> I thought you just can’t ship a non-GPL package with GPL libraries. BUT: If Microsoft makes Word relying on some GPLed library (core-functionality), then they can ship a closed source copy of Word as long as the user needs to download the GPL library from some other source? 
> 
> Isn’t that right?
> 
> Cheers, 
>   Wolfgang
>> On Oct 5, 2015, at 18:20, Perry Greenfield <stsci.perry at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> If that were the case then Python would have to be licensed as GPL since it uses readline optionally. But it isn’t and I know that they have looked at that issue carefully. From what I understand, if the functionality is not core to the package, and it isn’t bundled with the package, it doesn’t force the licensing of it. There probably are subtleties here since one might argue that readline is doesn’t add functionality to Python (but obviously it does), and healpy does. 
>> 
>> In this case I’m inclined to worry unless someone wants to make a legal issue of it, and in that even about the most that would happen is a cease-and-desist order. They aren’t going to make a lot of money suing Astropy (well, given the current checking account, they are bound to lose a lot of money in legal fees).
>> 
>> Perry
>> 
>> On Oct 5, 2015, at 12:07 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 2:46 AM, Thomas Robitaille <thomas.robitaille at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Emil,
>>> 
>>> The 'reproject' Astropy-affiliated package provides a way to easily
>>> reproject images using Healpy in addition to astropy.wcs:
>>> 
>>> http://reproject.readthedocs.org/en/stable/
>>> 
>>> The functionality with Healpy is optional, so the package is normally
>>> BSD-licensed, but if you do install Healpy, then as indicated here:
>>> 
>>> http://reproject.readthedocs.org/en/stable/healpix.html
>>> 
>>> you have to abide by the GPL license instead.
>>> 
>>> Hi Tom,
>>> 
>>> I don't want to stir up any problems for you, but I don't understand how this works legally.
>>> 
>>> You're distributing code that imports healpy. Even if it's "optional" functionality, the code that imports healpy is being distributed under a BSD license. As far as I understand it, the intent of the user doesn't matter for the licensing, all that matters is the license the code is distributed under.
>>> 
>>> I'd strongly urge you to contact e.g. debian-legal or the software freedom conservancy about this to get an opinion from an expert. I suspect your only legal recourses here are either to no longer import healpy in the reproject package or relicense reproject under a GPLv2 compatible license.
>>> 
>>> -Nathan
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Tom
>>> 
>>> Emil Lenc 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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