Free Python optimization framework

Sunday, August 3, 2008

IBM to acquire ILOG (CPLEX developer)

I've got to know: IBM and ILOG announced that they had signed an agreement regarding to the proposed acquisition of ILOG by IBM (one of URLs is here).

Let me remember those ones who are not closely connected to numerical optimization, that ILOG develops CPLEX (and some other, less famous, numerical optimization solvers), so ILOG is known as leader of commercial LP/MILP (and probably QP) solvers vendors (along with other well-known commercial ones - XA, XPRESS, Mosek, LOQO etc). You can check some benchmark results here.

Also, IBM is know as sponsor of well-know project COIN-OR that hosts lots of free solvers under CPL (an OSI-approved license with copyleft), including IPOPT, most famous free NLP solver (BTW Python programmers can can use this one from OO, but currently for Linux OSes only).

So it means there are some chances CPLEX will move from commercial-only status to more permissive one.

No comments: