As per the consensus in [1], I requested INFRA to delete the MXNet convenience binaries on repository.apache.org [2].
Zach previously offered to organize a third-party Maven distribution. However, based on recently updated version 0.4 of the draft Apache Downstream Distribution Branding Policy published in June 2020, the ASF does not allow the use of the MXNet for referring to a non-compliant distribution, taking the position that this would constitute a trademark infringement. Thus such third- party distributions are required to happen under a name not trademarked by the ASF. [3] On the question of building compliant CPU convenience binaries that can be distributed under the name MXNet, ASF now agrees that the previous stance of "libgfortran.so" is GPL and can't be distributed is incorrect based on the GCC Runtime Library Exception [4]. libgfortran.so itself still has a runtime dependency on pure GPL libquadmath.so, which can't be redistributed by ASF projects, but (unlike libgfortran.so) libquadmath.so has a stable ABI and we can ask users to install libquadmath.so on their systems to use the MXNet convenience binary. Instead of relying on the GNU Fortran compiler and introducing the libquadmath.so dependency, I tried using the Flang Fortran compiler [5]. In principle, it works well. But there are still a couple of bugs in OpenBLAS and/or Flang which mean that one needs to build OpenBLAS with -O1 optimization instead of -O2 to pass the test-suite. [6] This may be fixed in the next OpenBLAS release. One reason is that Flang performs more aggressive optimization and vectorization, meaning that once these bugs are fixed we may also find speed improvements by switching to Flang toolchain. Best regards Leonard [1]: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r9a949761ce5b9b40fc9404b44db012797a50e490163f5ae616428096%40%3Cdev.mxnet.apache.org%3E [2]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-20442 [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200612172050/www.apache.org/foundation/marks/downstream.html [4]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-523 [5]: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/pull/18513 [6]: https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/2650#issuecomment-643685423
