Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom + High Energy Physics

[Andrey G. Grozin]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Bob McElrath wrote:
> A much more appropriate library for interfacing is the GNU Scientific
> Library, BLAS, and LAPACK.  Taken together these cover almost all of the
> cernlib routines.  Anything it does not cover should be added to them,
> rather than imported from cernlib.  ;)
Right. Taken together, these libraries can be a good substitute for the 
NAG library which could be used from the commercial Axiom. It would be 
great to be able to do efficient numeric calculations inside a larger 
Axiom program, using these 3 excellent libraries.

There is a tricky point, however. GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is licensed 
under GPL (not LGPL). Therefore, Axiom linked with GSL (either statically 
or dynamically) is automatically under GPL. A historical example: the 
author of CLISP was forced (by RMS) to change its license to GPL, because 
it uses readline. This was my argument when I advocated using GPL for 
Axiom in the beginning of the project.

Andrey