[Numpy-discussion] Licensing question

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

On 08/02/2012 10:44 PM, Damon McDougall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a question about the licence for NumPy's codebase. I am currently
> writing a library and I'd like to release under some BSD-type licence.
> Unfortunately, my choice to link against MIT's FFTW library (released
> under the GPL) means that, in its current state, this is not possible.
> I'm an avid NumPy user and thought to myself that, since NumPy's licence
> is BSD, I'd be able to use some of the source code (with due credit, of
> course) instead of FFTW. Is this possible? I mean, can I redistribute
> *PART* of NumPy's codebase? Namely, the fftpack.c file? I was under the
> impression that I could only redistribute BSD source code as a whole and
> then I read the licence more carefully and it states that I can modify
> the source to suit my needs. I consider 'redistributing a single file
> and ignoring the other files' as a 'modification' under the BSD
> definition, but maybe I'm thinking too wishfully here.
>
> Any information on this matter would be greatly appreciated since I am a
> total code licence noob.
>
> Thank you.
>
> P.S. Yes, I know I could just release under the GPL, but I don't want to
> turn people off of packaging my work into a useful product licensed
> under BSD, or even make money from it.

Not related to licensing, but here's another port of FFTPACK to C by 
Martin Reinecke, licensed under BSD. The README has the links to the 
original Fortran sources that this is based on.

https://github.com/dagss/libfftpack

Dag