[Gmsh] Suggestion about license issues with tirangle and tetgen

[Christophe Geuzaine]

pfgshield-freebsd at yahoo.com wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> I am using triangle and tetgen with gmsh on FreeBSD and it's really great to
> have these alternatives... thanks!
> 
> On the FreeBSD port, unfortunately, the licensing issues prohibit us from
> redistributing gmsh with tetgen and triangle. Of course this is a problem
> derived from the license in both utilities and not really gmsh's fault. 
> 
> One thing could be done to alleviate the problem though: Adding exceptions to
> the GPL for linking with these libraries as explained in the GPL FAQ would
> permit people to make distributions of the package and libraries, although
> without charging any fee with it.
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs
> 
> I just thought I'd suggest it as it does help improve the functionality of gmsh
> to have more algorithms packaged.
> 

Pedro - We are preparing the release of Gmsh 2.0, and we plan to modify
the LICENSE file as follows:

Gmsh is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License
(GPL) with the following exception:

   The copyright holders of Gmsh give you permission to combine Gmsh
   with with code included in the standard release of Triangle by
   Jonathan Shewchuk (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/triangle.html) and
   TetGen by Hang Si (http://tetgen.berlios.de/index.html) under their
   respective licenses (or modified versions of such code, with
   unchanged licenses). You may copy and distribute such a system
   following the terms of the GNU GPL for Gmsh and the licenses of the
   other code concerned, provided that you include the source code of
   that other code when and as the GNU GPL requires distribution of
   source code.

   Note that people who make modified versions of Gmsh are not
   obligated to grant this special exception for their modified
   versions; it is their choice whether to do so. The GNU General
   Public License gives permission to release a modified version
   without this exception; this exception also makes it possible to
   release a modified version which carries forward this exception.

End of exception.


                     GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
                        Version 2, June 1991

  Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

etc., etc.



Does this solve the issue for the FreeBSD folks?

Christophe







> cheers,
> 
>     Pedro.
> 
> 
> 
> 	
> 
> 	
> 		
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-- 
Prof. Christophe Geuzaine
University of Liege, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~geuzaine