Distribution of Fast Downward in a Windows Program

[alva...@gmail.com]

HI all, 

I've come up with this question as part of one ongoing collaboration. The idea is to use Fast Downward (or other FD-based planners),  as part as a Windows application. In principle that should be fine with FD's license as the application just makes a external call to Fast Downward. However, there is the question of how to package and distribute Fast Downward without requiring the user to follow any separate installation step, neither for Fast Downward or its dependencies (python for example).  I've seen that know there are Docker images that could help with that but then the user would also have to install docker I assume.  I've limited experience with doing Windows installation packages so I'm not really sure how to best approach this. 

I know that this is not the intended use for Fast Downward, which is mostly for research purposes, but if anyone has some similar experience, any advice on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated. 

Cheers, 

Alvaro

[davi...@umich.edu]

Alvaro,

Was there a reply to your question? My (limited) understanding is the GPL license would require you to release the source code of any changes you made to FD and--possibly--to your own application depending on how tight the integration was. Can anyone comment if that is correct?

-david

[Victor Paléologue]

I studied the question a little, and it depends on how it is packaged.

If you start Fast Downward as a subprocess, you are technically not linking with it, and ask the system (a component that is out of your hands) to start it for you.

In theory that serves as an interface that allows Fast Downward to be replaced by anything else, and therefore the dependency is legitimately looser, so the license of the program must not contaminate.

That is why ROSPlan embeds binaries of planners directly, but can still pretend to the BSD license!

You could do the same.

However it is open to debate in the GNU community whether a system packaging GPL binaries out of the box should be GPL.

Some argue that as soon as you provide an app that embeds a GPL binary and it is pre-configured to use it, even via a subprocess, GPL should propagate.

Like anything pre-installed on a Linux would become GPL by these standards.

But this is a marginal claim, and the consensus is that GPL do not propagate in these conditions.

In the case of Fast Downward for Android, it is a service provided by a separate app, so your app does not embed it.

So even with pretty high standards, the GPL license does not propagate to your app.

In turn, it is not perfectly guaranteed to get the real Fast Downward when it uses the service interface.

Something or someone else bears the responsibility to make sure it is installed.

[David Epstein]

Thank you Victor! I was not aware that C and C++ code could compile on Android or that GPL involved such legal subtleties.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fast Downward" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fast-downwar...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fast-downward/f9c9d6c3-3111-42bc-a5f6-7e3ffb1e4ecan%40googlegroups.com.