Re: Bits about Intel MKL packaging -- Higher Priority than OpenBLAS

[Dima Kogan <dima@secretsauce.net>]

Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> writes:

> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 06:36:51PM +0200, S�stien Villemot wrote:
>
>> There is also a licensing issue: using GPL'd software (e.g. GNU
>> Octave) with MKL is not allowed.
>
> I think that's a pretty strong reason to rate non-free software lowest
> in the alternatives. Packaging useful non-free software is fine but
> ranking it higher than free alternatives seems in contrast with our
> social contract. Users who want to use it should be able to handle
> alternatives system.

I really would like to see MKL having the highest priority.

Is the licensing issue only there when any other components being linked
are licensed under the GPL? If so, we need to either

1. actually handle this issue to make the link fail in cases of license
   violations

2. not ship MKL at all

3. decide that the user is sophisticated-enough to manually figure this
   out

Currently we're on the path to option 3. non-free repos are already
opt-in, and the user already needs to do manual work to get them. If
they have done this manual work, that's plenty of an indication that
they have decided that license purity isn't a priority for them.

If I was a user who manually added the non-free repos and then manually
installed the mkl libraries, I'd be aggravated to find out that there's
yet another hoop I need to jump through to actually use these libraries.
This would be a waste of my time, especially since I have already taken
actions to clearly indicate that I want MKL.

We can decide that we're not interested in providing a license-impure
option, but then we shouldn't be providing a non-free, and we don't need
to rehash that argument.