Fwd: New package

[Michael Goffioul]

Forgot to Cc the mailing list.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Goffioul <address@hidden>
Date: Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: New package
To: Guillermo Moliní <address@hidden>

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:58 AM, Guillermo Moliní <address@hidden> wrote:

2014-07-22 15:48 GMT+02:00 Ben Abbott <address@hidden>:

On Jul 22, 2014, at 9:37 AM, Guillermo Moliní <address@hidden> wrote:

> 2014-07-22 15:31 GMT+02:00 Carlo de Falco <address@hidden>:
> I am afraid what you want to do is not legally possible.
> Please Do NOT post your code here.
> c.
>
> What do you mean with not legally possible?
> If you mean that cuda is propietary, id say thats true, but im not modifying anything, just making use of the api. There are other examples of opensource libraries that do the same, like http://managedcuda.codeplex.com/

The terms of the GNU license make it illegal.  Or has the source code for the cuda code been made freely available?

Ben

What terms of the GNU License make it illegal? the link I just gave you above also has a GNU Library General Public License (LGPL), and does what I intend to do. That is, provide a wrapper (in that case for c#, in mine for octave), so that the cuda api can be used. Couldnt it be considered the cuda API as a system library under section 7?

 

Writing an oct-file requires you to release it under a GPLv3-compatible license. However, this is not possible if the same code also makes use of another library (like CUDA) which is not compatible with GPLv3. Whether you distribute your code in source form or binary form does not matter. And I don't think that CUDA falls under the system library definition, though you might want to ask FSF about that.

The link you gave about is a different situation: it only makes use of CUDA (as far as I understand), so it can be released under any license that is compatible with CUDA's license. But as long as you want to turn your code into an oct-file, you need to be compatible with GPLv3.

Michael.