[Pkg-exppsy-pymvpa] model selection and other questions

[Michael Hanke]

Hi,

I completely second Yarik's statement (thanks for being verbose),
therefore I will jump directly to the last open question.

Emanuele, if you decide to contribute (some of) your code to PyMVPA, you
can have commit access at any time. We'd also be very interested in your
oppinion about PyMVPA's class hierarchy and where your code would fit
best (or what refactoring is needed to make it fit).

On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 11:30:21AM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
<snip>
> > A last question about the license:
> > - NumPy/SciPy enforces the (modified) BSD license
> > - scikits adresses a wider range but mainly (modified) BSD and GPL (v2?v3?)
> > - PyMVPA is distributed under the MIT (X11) license.
> > - shogun is GPL (v3)
> 
> > Which is the reason of MIT/X11 license instead of (modified) BSD or GPL?
> Michael is much better aware of license situation so I will be quiet on
> this one, but so far all copyright holders of the code are in-contact
> and flexible in terms of what license to choose. We already thought
> about double-licensing it so pymvpa could be used with shogun (GPL drags
> us into GPL world)
This is a surprisingly complicated issue. The original choice of MIT was
done to be compatible with NumPy/SciPy world. Both actually are fine
with BSD and MIT:

http://www.scipy.org/License_Compatibility

At some point shogun appeared on the radar and caused licensing trouble.
This trouble is the major reason why shogun interface is not yet part of
the PyMVPA main branch.

However, currently I'm not convinced that this is a real problem as
shogun provides a plain python interface with sufficient functionality,
so we do not have to link against any shogun lib. We still need to
clarify this however.

But as Yarik said, all copyright holders (which are few) are in close
contact and could potentially change the license in any direction. We
already had one request to change it to GPL. But currently, IMHO there
is no need to switch, besides philosophical reasons (which I nevertheless
consider valid) and I personaly prefer to stick to the current license
unless some situation prevents us from doing what we want to do ;-)

Hope that explains.


Cheers,

Michael

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