Dear MXNet community, as per recent mail on gene...@incubator.apache.org [1] there are a number of licensing issues in MXNet 1.6rc1. Based on anecdotal evidence I believe there has been no release so far without any licensing issues, which is a blocker to MXNet graduating from it's incubating status. One contributing factor is that we bundle 3rdparty source code in our releases [2].
One key factor is that 3rdparty projects don't always enforce licensing best practice in the way we do. For example, 3rdparty/ps-lite doesn't enforce license headers in the source files and there has been confusion about the license of recent contributions by ByteDance (See [1]). To avoid such licensing issues in MXNet releases a simple solution is to stop distributing the 3rdparty code in our source releases. Instead, we can adapt our buildsystem to download 3rdparty code as part of the build configuration process. CMake makes this very easy with the FetchContent module [3]. For development purpose involving changes to the 3rdparty source or build systems that can't access the internet, there are easy means for specifying the location of local sources (instead of downloading), via the FETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_<someName> variable [4]. Would there be any concerns about such approach? Obviously it can only be fully implemented as soon as the CMake build system is feature complete and the Makefile build can be dropped. (Note that the Makefile build is being deprecated and removed as part of MXNet 2 roadmap [5]) Best regards Leonard [1]: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rb83ff64bdac464df2f0cf2fe8fb4c6b9d3b8fa62b645763dc606045f%40%3Cgeneral.incubator.apache.org%3E [2]: See the .tar.gz files at https://incubator.apache.org/clutch/mxnet.html [3]: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/FetchContent.html [4]: https://cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2019-June/069709.html [5]: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues/16167
