[SciPy-User] Central File Exchange for SciPy

[John Hunter]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:

> My personal opinion is that in the long run, it would be beneficial to
> have this 'file exchange' have BSD-only code (or public domain, since
> employees of the US Federal government as far as I understand must
> publish their codes under public domain terms).

The flip side of this is that there are many environments in which the
distinction between GPL and BSD is irrelevant, eg for code we deploy
internally at work and do not distribute.  Suppose someone writes some
really nifty code that depends on pygsl.  I would rather have access
to it on the file exchange than not.  If the code submission dialogs
has a choice of licenses with BSD as the default, and selection of
non-BSD takes them to an explanation of why we prefer BSD and an "are
you sure" dialog, then including this code is beneficial in my view.

> The reason is simple:
> snippets put there, when good, are prime candidates for integration
> into numpy/scipy proper.  It would be a shame, and frankly somewhat
> absurd, to have a bunch of great codes sitting on the scipy server
> that we couldn't integrate into scipy.  At least it seems so to me...

I'm not sure I agree here.  Many snippets may be more like elaborate
examples.  Something designed to get you started that you can perturb
off of.  For some of the stuff it may be farm league for scipy/numpy
inclusion, but there is plenty of room for useful scripts that don't
belong in scipy proper.  So I would err on the side of inclusion and
very low barriers to entry.

JDH