Re: [Fedora-legal-list] Re: FlexiBLAS as BLAS/LAPACK manager - Fedora 33 System-Wide Change proposal

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On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 05:20:48PM +0200, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Jul 2020 at 16:20, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> <zbyszek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > > Would the maintainer consider switching the whole thing to LGPLv3?
> > > > This would preserve the freeness of his code and be much less hassle
> > > > for everyone involved, with no interpretation of new legal texts required.
> > >
> > > LGPL has other implications towards proprietary software, and that's
> > > what the authors specifically want to protect, so that's a hard line.
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean. LGPL keeps the code free but allows it to be
> > freely combined with software under different licenses, which is what we
> > want in this case.
> 
> Yeap, but it's more permissive also with the FlexiBLAS interface (the
> one that enables hooking into the duplicated BLAS/LAPACK interface,
> the one that BLAS/LAPACK consumers are not using), and this is what
> the authors do not want.

OK. Thanks for the clarification.

Maybe talk with the authors and tell them that a few functions to provide
this extra interface are not important enough to create all the hassle with
GPLv3 for a commonly used library and that LGPL would protect their code
almost as well? I assume that they want their library to be widely used,
and this strict licensing will be a constant source of problems because
many existing scientific packages are using more liberal licensing and will
not want to change their licensing to accommodate flexiblas.

> > > Wouldn't the Classpath Exception [1] be appropriate here? This
> > > wouldn't require the interpretation of a new legal text.
> >
> > Classpath exception talks about "executable". This isn't very precise,
> > but at least in normal speech, a library is not an executable, so the
> > classpath exception would not cover other libraries which link to
> > flexiblass. So for example, numpy would not be covered by the exception.
> 
> True. But what about the "Linking over a controlled interface
> exception"? That sounds like exactly this case:
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface

Yep, that seems like it would work. The first para contains a legal
interpretation of GPLv3 and thus doesn't belong in the exception text.
But the rest is OK.

Zbyszek
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