Re:John Deere has turned itself into a poster-child for the ...
by cm2187 on Sunday April 23, 2017 @06:22AM
(#14177507)
Actually here is a practical example of the sort of annoyance resulting from FOSS licenses.
Google developped an excellent library that they open sourced called Google OR Tools [1]. It not only provides access to Google's in house linear programming optimiser, but also acts as a wrapper around other solvers, some free, some commercial, so that you just change a parameter to try another solver.
However because of conflicting licenses or licenses restrictions, google cannot distribute binaries that include certain FOSS solvers, like GLPK. So to be able to use GLPK you need to recompile the whole project yourself. If you go on the Google OR tool forum, you will see that it's not a simple CTR+SHIFT+B, everyone is struggling, and I wasted a lot of time trying to do this.
Google developped an excellent library that they open sourced called Google OR Tools [1]. It not only provides access to Google's in house linear programming optimiser, but also acts as a wrapper around other solvers, some free, some commercial, so that you just change a parameter to try another solver.
However because of conflicting licenses or licenses restrictions, google cannot distribute binaries that include certain FOSS solvers, like GLPK. So to be able to use GLPK you need to recompile the whole project yourself. If you go on the Google OR tool forum, you will see that it's not a simple CTR+SHIFT+B, everyone is struggling, and I wasted a lot of time trying to do this.
That's what I mean by strings attached.
[1] https://developers.google.com/optimization/