IGLU-PYTHON translation

[staskh]

Greetings!

I began translating IGLU into a pure Python package and would appreciate your help, criticism, suggestions, and contributions. I concentrate on the complete "drop-in" capability to function similarly to IGLU-PY without requiring R to be installed.

This project can be found at https://github.com/staskh/iglu_python and https://pypi.org/project/iglu-python/.

Regards
Stas

[irinagain]

Hi Stas,

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’d appreciate the opportunity to follow up with you directly—please feel free to contact me at irinagn@umich.edu, or let me know the best way to reach you.

In the meantime, I’d like to highlight a few important considerations:

License Compliance: The iglu package is released under the GPL-2 license (previously listed in the DESCRIPTION file and now also included as a LICENSE file to avoid any ambiguity). Any translation or derivative work must also be released under GPL-2 or GPL-3. At present, it appears this requirement is not met—this is a common oversight, but it is an important legal and ethical constraint. GPL is a so-called copyleft license that, among other factors, ensures the work remains open source.

Functionality Duplication: We developed iglu-py specifically to provide Python functionality without duplicating code. While installing R may seem like a hurdle, it is also free and open-source, and this setup ensures code consistency over time. Direct translations risk becoming unsynchronized with the main codebase, leading to divergence and maintenance issues. If native Python functionality is a priority, several existing CGM packages in Python may already meet your needs, like Diametrics, GlyCulator and there may be others.

Attribution and Novelty: With iglu being open-source, everyone is welcome to reuse and adapt the code provided (a) compliance with GPL-2 terms; (b) clear attribution, including the version of the code translated and any modifications made (general academic standard but also GPL-2 requirement); and (c) understand that the novelty of a direct translation is limited, especially if you are considering future publication of the work. You may also consider whether you are willing to invest into continued maintenance and checks with iglu in case you want the translated version to be always up to date (you may not).

Please don’t hesitate to follow up if you have further questions or would like to discuss in more detail.

Best regards,
Irina