Free Linear Programming Software? 14
Chao-Kuei Hung asks: "I will be teaching a freshman level math class next semester in which half of the course deal will deal with linear programming.
I found a number of linear programming software packages from
this website, but none of them seems to meet any of the FSF/OSI/Debian's definition of free/open source software, although some come with source code and some cost $0 for educational
use. Does there exist truely free software for this
topic? Are there LP modules/plug-ins for things like octave, rlab, or R?"
Freshmeat has some (Score:4, Informative)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/glpk/
"The GLPK package is intended for solving linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MIP) problems. It is a set of routines organized in the form of a library and written in the ANSI C programming language."
A survey of available software:
http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/surveys/LP/lp4.h
Hope some of these might help
Linear Programming FAQ (Score:4, Informative)
LPABO and LPAKO (Score:4, Informative)
from the Seoul National University [snu.ac.kr]. LPABO
uses an interior-point method, while LPAKO uses the simplex method.
I've looked at several other free LP solvers, and this package looks like it is fairly fast and
robust.
I wasn't able to find a license for these packages. Maybe you could ask the author about releasing their software under the GPL or another Free Software license?
Octave (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Octave (Score:1)
mentioned Octave in his question!
GSL - GNU Scientific Library (Score:4, Informative)
lpsolve (Score:1)
The source is quite easy to get into and mess with, so you should be able to write a simple wrapper for whatever, including octave. I think the Matlab wrapper already exists.
It even can solve MILPs, but not very well in some cases.