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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

> with a liberal license

I hope Julia doesn't rely on inferior libraries just out of copyleft phobia. I would much rather use FFTW than FFTPACK or whatever other alternative they have in mind. FFTW is really best in class.

I'm okay with them making FFTW optional, but please make it opt-out, not opt-in. People should be getting the best software by default. Copyleft isn't going to hurt anyone but people who are trying to hide source code, and scientific computing needs all of the visible source code we can get.

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Many things in Base have moved to separate packages to make it light-weight.

FFTW is available in a package under the MIT license [1]. Also its author is a top contributor to Julia ;).

[1] https://github.com/JuliaMath/FFTW.jl

That MIT license only applies to the Julia wrapper code. The package downloads and dynamically links into an FFTW shared library, which means any code that uses it needs to be GPL if distributed as a whole.

The README for that package [0] states:

> Note that FFTW is licensed under GPLv2 or higher (see its license file), but the bindings to the library in this package, FFTW.jl, are licensed under MIT. This means that code using the FFTW library via the FFTW.jl bindings is subject to FFTW's licensing terms.

If you have an idea on how to make that clearer, we would be happy to review a PR to the FFTW.jl repository.

[0] https://github.com/JuliaMath/FFTW.jl

My mistake, docs there are fine. A few other BinaryBuilder-using packages have neglected to mention this issue, last I checked. And BTW BinaryBuilder is violating even MIT licenses if you don't package and include the license file along with the shared-library download.

Most of these things are just packages. Just install FFTW.jl to get that FFT. https://github.com/JuliaMath/FFTW.jl

Julia's Base is for the language, not for every little detail so this is all handled by the package ecosystem.

Also those bindings were developed by Steve Johnson himself!

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