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DrTimothyAldenDavis / SuiteSparse

The official SuiteSparse library: a suite of sparse matrix algorithms authored or co-authored by Tim Davis, Texas A&M University.
https://people.engr.tamu.edu/davis/suitesparse.html
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License inconsistency for CHOLMOD/Include #697

Closed svillemot closed 8 months ago

svillemot commented 8 months ago

The LICENSE.txt at the root of the repository states that CHOLMOD/Include is under the LGPL. But inside those four headers, it is said that they are under the Apache 2.0 license.

So there is some inconsistency that needs to be fixed.

Incidentally, cholmod.h lacks an SPDX-License-Identifier entry.

DrTimothyAldenDavis commented 8 months ago

cholmod.h is an odd file. I used to have individual headers for each CHOLMOD module, but that's annoying to have in a linux distro so I went with a single cholmod.h file. But then that single cholmod.h header has files from Modules with different licenses: LGPL and GPL.

So I'm reluctant to add an SPEX-License-Identifier since it might be confused as to being the license for all of CHOLMOD.

I can fix the LICENSE.txt file though.

I should probably stick with LGPL-2 for cholmod.h, since CHOLMOD is otherwise just two licenses: some LGPL and some GPL. That might be simpler.

DrTimothyAldenDavis commented 8 months ago

On 2nd thought, I'll leave them as Apache-2.0, because of this discussion, which I want to preserve:

https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/SuiteSparse/blob/6c2d12b24005bc6fae9d2de6c3115844b76695b4/CHOLMOD/Include/cholmod.h#L23-L33

I'll just revise the LICENSE.txt file to say Apache-2.0, and also add more clarification, with this commit to the dev2 branch: https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/SuiteSparse/commit/06adfc0126c44bc4bfd1d92f7367dce90c521166

Thanks for catching this glitch.

Does this look clear now?

svillemot commented 8 months ago

Thanks, the proposed commit addresses my concerns.