[Python-Dev] Mersenne Twister

[Tim Peters]

[Oren Tirosh[]
> The Mersenne Twister distribution is now under the Artistic License.
>
> http://www.math.keio.ac.jp/~matumoto/eartistic.html

That's out of date.  When they updated the code earlier this year to fix the
initialization weakness, they also adpoted a new license:

    MT19337 with initialization improved 2002/1/26
    The initialization scheme of older versions of MT has a (small)
    problem, that MSBs are not well reflected to the state vector. Here
    is the latest version of initialization scheme, which we consider
    the newest standard. An initialization routine using an array of
    seeds is also available.
    We adopted BSD-license which we think most flexible, so this code
    is freely usable.

That's much less problematic than the Artistic License (which Stallman holds
in contempt; his objection to BSD+advertising_clause is so technical it's
hard to give a damn).