[GRASS-dev] GRASS inefficiency and FFTW

[stefano de paoli]

Hi Daniel,

> 
> I think you need to take into acount in your
> analysis the constraining
> scarce resource within several FLOSS projects:
> motivated manpower. WRT
> FFT, the current implementation is efficient in
> development cost,
> although inefficient at runtime wrt to the NR
> illegal implementation.


This is a good point. I think I need to take in
account what GRASS is (few developers, large code base
and so on).
 
But following your arguments about development cost we
can try to immagine a different scenario.
The Numerical Recipes FFT was eliminated due to the
incompatibility between the NR copyright and the GPL.
 
What if GRASS would have been released under a license

compatible with the Numerical recipes copyright?
(I'm not sure whwther such a license exists)

Probably, in such a situation the development cost
argument conclusion would be that the Numerical
Recipes would still be in GRASS.

Not changing the code at all is much more efficient in
term of development cost.

Note that previous GRASS development team (CERL) had
an agreement with the authors of NR, to use freely NR:

/* Based on "Numerical Recipies in C; The Art of
Scientific Computing" (Cambridge University Press,
1988).  Copyright (C) 1986, 1988 by Numerical Recipes
Software.  
Permission is granted for unlimited use within GRASS
only.  */



I still support the conclusion that there is an
inefficiency which heavily dependes on the GPL choice.



> 
> To support your argument, I would rather investigate
> the cases of both
> Harmony projects (the first was a clean-room
> reimplementation of the
> Qt toolkit under a free software licence; the second
> idem for Java)
> and especially the whole Java situation. Debian
> discussions wrt to
> Java and the java trap could be a good source.

Basically I'm not trying to support the argument that
there are many situations where freedom matters are
more important than "efficiency".

My research focuses on GRASS as a full case study on
copyright issue in Free Software development.

Which means that I'm studying GRASS copyright history
from the release under the GPL in 1999 to the 
discussions on the OSGeo CLA.  

It is already more than 3 years that I'm colecting and
analising data from GRASS mailing lists :-).   

stefano
 
> > Stefano
> 
> Daniel.
> 
> -- 
> -- Daniel Calvelo Aros
> 



	

	
		
___________________________________ 
L'email della prossima generazione? Puoi averla con la nuova Yahoo! Mail: 
http://it.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html