+1 On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 10:19 AM Lausen, Leonard <lau...@amazon.com.invalid> wrote:
> 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 >
