Licenses and Dependencies

Stan and its dependent libraries, are distributed under generous, freedom-respecting licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative.

In particular, the licenses for Stan and its dependent libraries have no “copyleft” provisions requiring applications of Stan to be open source if they are redistributed.

This chapter specifies the licenses for the libraries on which Stan’s math library, language, and algorithms depend. The last tool mentioned, Google Test, is only used for testing and is not needed to run Stan.

Stan license

Stan is distributed under

The copyright holder of each contribution is the developer or his or her assignee.1

Boost license

Stan uses the Boost library for template metaprograms, traits programs, the parser, and various numerical libraries for special functions, probability functions, and random number generators. Boost is distributed under the

The copyright for each Boost package is held by its developers or their assignees.

Eigen license

Stan uses the Eigen library for matrix arithmetic and linear algebra. Eigen is distributed under the

The copyright of Eigen is owned jointly by its developers or their assignees.

SUNDIALS license

Stan uses the SUNDIALS package for solving differential equations. SUNDIALS is distributed under the

The copyright of SUNDIALS is owned by Lawrence Livermore National Security Lab.

Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) License

Stan uses the Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) library for parallel computations. TBB is distributed under the

The copyright of TBB is owned by Intel Corporation.

Google test license

Stan uses Google Test for unit testing; it is not required to compile or execute models. Google Test is distributed under the

The copyright of Google Test is owned by Google, Inc.

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Footnotes

  1. Universities or companies often own the copyright of computer programs developed by their employees.↩︎