Re: Update on non-compliant releases on repository.apache.org and how to obtain a compliant build
Hi Justin, Thank you. Please note that the libgfortran.so is not subject to the GPL in this case as one may relicense it under the Apache License 2 based on the license grant by the GCC developers. Thus any policy wrt to GPL is unrelated, as we are not talking about GPL software. The ticket has been open since 7+ days, so there has been plenty of time to voice concerns. Let's discuss on the ticket if you have concerns. If not, what's the process to close the ticket? Thank you Leonard On Fri, 2020-06-19 at 23:36 +, Justin Mclean wrote: > CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click > links or open attachments unless you can confirm the sender and know the > content is safe. > > > > Hi, > > > 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]. > > I would wait until that legal JIRA is closed before assuming this is the case. > I think you may of misinterpreted what Roman was saying. The currently policy > is GPL with exceptions are are not allowed, either in a release or as a > dependancy. [1] > > Thanks, > Justin > > 1. https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x >
Re: Update on non-compliant releases on repository.apache.org and how to obtain a compliant build
Hi, > 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]. I would wait until that legal JIRA is closed before assuming this is the case. I think you may of misinterpreted what Roman was saying. The currently policy is GPL with exceptions are are not allowed, either in a release or as a dependancy. [1] Thanks, Justin 1. https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x
Update on non-compliant releases on repository.apache.org and how to obtain a compliant build
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