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Cartographer is effectively GPL because of Ceres -> SuiteSparse dependency #1939

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ojura opened this issue Nov 9, 2023 · 1 comment
Open

Cartographer is effectively GPL because of Ceres -> SuiteSparse dependency #1939

ojura opened this issue Nov 9, 2023 · 1 comment

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@ojura
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ojura commented Nov 9, 2023 •
edited

In #971, the following was noticed:

When libsuitesparse-dev is not installed, (Ceres) optimization will take >100 times longer.
It would nice to warn about this.

Building Cartographer was then switched to require Ceres with SuiteSparse in #189.

However, a component of SuiteSparse, CHOLMOD/Supernodal, is licensed under GPL. Effectively, this turn Ceres, Cartographer and all other software that builds upon it to be GPL licensed.

More information in:
ceres-solver/ceres-solver#1026

In order for Cartographer to be GPL-free, Ceres either needs to use a GPL-free sparse linear algebra backend (as described in ceres-solver/ceres-solver#1026); or Cartographer needs to be switched to another solver for solving the pose graph optimization problem.

The Ceres scan matcher in LocalTrajectoryBuilder is fine; it does not need a sparse solver. The OptimizationProblem in PoseGraph needs a sparse solver.
@bufeng-12
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bufeng-12 commented Nov 9, 2023 via email

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@ojura @bufeng-12