The code was developed at US government research laboratories and is therefore public domain software.
"SLATEC" is an acronym for the Sandia, Los Alamos, Air Force Weapons Laboratory Technical Exchange Committee, an organization formed in 1974 to foster the exchange of technical information between the computer centers of three US government laboratories.
In 1977, the SLATEC Common Mathematical Library (CML) Subcommittee decided to construct a library of FORTRAN subprograms to provide portable, non-proprietary, mathematical software that could be used on a variety of computers, including supercomputers, at the three sites.
[3] The GNU Scientific Library (GSL), initiated in 1996 and stable since 2001, was started with the explicit aim to provide a more modern replacement for SLATEC.
Some of these subpackages are also well known as free-standing FORTRAN subprogram libraries, including BLAS, EISPACK, FFTPACK, LINPACK and QUADPACK.