[SciPy-Dev] Levenberg-Marquardt Implementation

[Robert Kern]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 9:48 PM, Evgeni Burovski
<evgeny.burovskiy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 9:25 PM, Evgeni Burovski
>> <evgeny.burovskiy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> FWIW, One other possiblity for constrained minimization would be to
>>> wrap BOBYQA by Powell.
>>>
>>> (Disclaimer: All I know about it is from skimming this paper
>>> www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/na/NA_papers/NA2009_06.pdf‎
>>> and talking to people in PyData London last weekend.)
>>>
>>> As far as I understand,
>>>
>>> * it's a state of the art minimizer
>>> * the original Fortran code is in public domain
>>
>> I see no indication of this.
>
> The very last paragraph of readme.txt in bobyqa.zip from
> http://mat.uc.pt/~zhang/software.html#bobyqa
> """
> <snip>
> There are no
> restrictions on or charges for the use of the software. I hope that the time
> and effort I have spent on developing the package will be helpful to much
> research and to many applications.
> """

Well, that's certainly not public domain. It *might* be a license
grant that is intended to be maximally free, but I wouldn't risk it.
"use" is not really sufficient. It might refer to simply running the
program unmodified, not the additional rights to modify and
redistribute that scipy's BSD license explicitly calls for (in
addition to, and thus separate and distinct from "use"). When in
doubt, ask the original author.

-- 
Robert Kern