[GRASS-dev] GRASS inefficiency and FFTW

[Hamish]

stefano de paoli wrote:
> What is menaningful is to learn from the GRASS NR
> case, something for our understanding of Free Software
> in general: that the idealistic idea of Bazzar is
> simply wrong in many cases.
> Open Source advocates usually says that the solution
> to a problem in the "Open Source model" would be the
> best possible solution.
..
> Probably my mistake is to think that this solution is
> necessarily related to the "freedom" of software. 

The NR example has little to do with "freedom" software -- regardless of
GRASS being a GPL project or proprietary one, we must still observe
copyright law and remove any possible infringements.

A question might be: would it be more efficient to work under a "bandit"
license and ignore copyright law? Yes, until the day when we all get
arrested, at which point productivity declines.

But maybe if we were proprietary we could buy our way out of the problem
by licensing the NR code, which could be considered "more efficient",
depending on the licensing costs vs. the cost of developer time. (but as
apparently we already had special permission to use the NR code, this is
somewhat moot for the NR example)

In this case we took extra work to remove the NR code, either because:
 we wanted the code to be fully Free for others to use in their projects,
 or we hadn't noticed that we had special permission to use NR code,
 or we figured that the special permission, while nice to have, was
    incompatible with our chosen licensing terms.

I don't know which answer it is, but only the first option is specific
to a FOSS project.


Hamish