Re: [Savannah-hackers] submission of OpenPOOMA - savannah.nongnu.org

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi,

I'm evaluating the project you submitted for approval in Savannah.

> Richard Guenther <address@hidden> described the
> package as follows:
> License: other
> Other License: Here I provide the license for the OpenPOOMA project
> (the original POOMA license is just the license at the bottom of the
> license).  If you have concerns to the wording of the license to the
> POOMA changes, I will happily apply suggested changes.
> 
> --- snip ---
> 
> OpenPOOMA is based on POOMA 2.4.0 which is licensed under the
> conditions stated at the end of this file.  Changes to this baseline,
> distributed as OpenPOOMA, are subject to the following License (based
> on the MIT license), which is as follows:
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
> a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
> "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
> without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
> distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
> permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
> the following conditions:
> 
> All copyright notices and this permission notice shall be included in
> all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
> 
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
> EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
> MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
> NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
> LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
> OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
> WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------


This is what we call the Expat license
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat), verbatim. It is
perfectly ok.



> The POOMA 2.4.0 license is as follows (note that ACL is no more, thus
> address@hidden and http://www.acl.lanl.gov/pooma/ are dead):
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> This software and ancillary information (herein called "SOFTWARE")
> called POOMA (Parallel Object-Oriented Methods and Applications) is
> made available under the terms described here.  The SOFTWARE has been
> approved for release with associated LA-CC Number LA-CC-98-65.
> 
> Unless otherwise indicated, this SOFTWARE has been authored by an
> employee or employees of the University of California, operator of the
> Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-ENG-36 with
> the U.S. Department of Energy.  The U.S. Government has rights to use,
> reproduce, and distribute this SOFTWARE. The public may copy, distribute,
> prepare derivative works and publicly display this SOFTWARE without
> charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are
> reproduced on all copies.  Neither the Government nor the University
> makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or
> responsibility for the use of this SOFTWARE.
> 
> If SOFTWARE is modified to produce derivative works, such modified
> SOFTWARE should be clearly marked, so as not to confuse it with the
> version available from LANL.
> 
> For more information about POOMA, send e-mail to address@hidden,
> or visit the POOMA web page at http://www.acl.lanl.gov/pooma/.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Package: OpenPOOMA
> System name: openpooma


Savannah's mission is to host free software projects, and we want the
public to think of them as free software projects.  A project name
that says "open" will tend to lead people to think of the project as
"open source" instead of "free software".

We would be glad if you accept to use "free" instead of "open" in your
project name.



> Type: non-GNU
> 
> Description:
> POOMA is a C++ library supporting element-wise, data-parallel, and
> stencil-basedphysics computations using one or more processors.  The
> library automatically handles all interprocessor communication,
> obviating the need for any explicit communication code and enabling
> the same program to be run on one or thousands of processors.  The
> library supports high-level syntax close to mathematical or
> algorithmic syntax, easing the conversion from algorithms to code.
> 
> POOMA was originally developed at the Advanced Computing Laboratory
> of Los Alamos National Laboratory.  ACL has been shut down recently
> and development continued at CodeSourcery, LLC, where the current
> CVS is hosted as of today.  CodeSourcery can no longer support
> development of the POOMA library, and as the main contributor in the
> last two years I was asked to move hosting to a public site.
> 
> The current hosting site is http://www.codesourcery.com/pooma/ where
> also anonymous CVS is provided.
> 
> The moved POOMA project will be distributed as OpenPOOMA to comply
> with the license from LANL and changes to the library will be
> licensed under a MIT style license.
> 
> The current POOMA sources contain some .gif files in its
> documentation which will be either converted in CVS or manually
> without preserving CVS history (as you like).


Just convert the .gif files in the HEAD version of your repository
before importing the files at Savannah.



> The current POOMA sources support using of certain packages with
> unclear (no) or free licenses.  Alternative free support for the
> extra features is provided, or the support for using of those
> (unmaintained) packages will be removed to ease maintainance of the
> library.
> 
> Other Software Required:
> OpenPOOMA requires a standard conforming C++ implementation
> including a C++ runtime library.
> OpenPOOMA can optionally use a MPI library (such as MPICH or LAM)
> for message passing parallelism. OpenPOOMA can optionally be
> compiled with an OpenMP supporting compiler for thread level
> parallelism.
> OpenPOOMA contains (optional) interfaces to the HDF5 and the PETSc
> libraries.
> 
> All the packages above are available in the Debian main archive.


All the dependencies appear to be free software indeed.



> Other Comments:
> Beyond
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2004-10/msg00741.html
> there is some fuss about the licensing of POOMA.
> 
> I asked address@hidden about the licensing and licensing of
> changes to the source under ticket #213170, the license was said to
> be GPL compatible and a differing license for changes to POOMA was
> considered ok.


Thanks for the information.

The licensing issues are cleared except for one thing: in order to
release your project properly and unambiguously under the Expat
license, please place copyright notices and permission-to-copy
statements at the beginning of every file of source code. You have to
update the license notice and add a (missing) copyright notice to each
file of the repository that is more than 10 lines long.

For more information, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html
(aimed at the GNU GPL but can be used as a basis).

Also check:
www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html
www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/License-Notices.html
(general information, though aimed at GNU maintainers)


> In the progress of moving the project a present CVSROOT has to be
> installed and (optionally) mailing-list archives in mbox format can
> be moved.


We can do it. Just send us your RCS files and your mboxes.


If you are willing to make the changes mentioned above, please provide
us with an URL to an updated tarball of your project.  Upon review, we
will reconsider your project for inclusion in Savannah.

Regards,

-- 
Sylvain