Dear Dr Li,
thank you for maintaining the SuperLU code. We're preparing to update
to the latest version in the Debian GNU/Linux project.
We noticed some licence changes in v5.2.1 and wanted to draw your
attention to some discrepancies which have concerned us.
The licence for your own SuperLU code is BSD. But a handful of files
in the SuperLU package come from other sources, with their own
licences. In v5.2.1 you've prepended the BSD licence, which seems to
introduce contradictions with the original authors' licences.
I've attached our tally of the various licences.
In some cases the licence is compatible. The copyrights of the Xerox
Corporation have a simpler licence, and there is a close relationship
between them and your lab.
In other cases the licence is more or less compatible, e.g.
SRC/colamd.*, but the University of Florida's copyright still remains
and isn't superseded by Berkeley's BSD.
But the University of Minnesota's ITSOL code in EXAMPLE/*fgmr.c has a
GPL licence which simply cannot be converted to BSD. In that case the
prepended BSD notice is a contradiction.
With MATLAB/time.m, you've removed the Mathworks copyright statement
but the code is the same. Has Mathworks released the sample code as
public domain?
Could I ask you to audit the code licences in SuperLU? You've added
the MC64 licence notice to License.txt, perhaps the others could be
listed there too (removing their prepended BSD notices).
Thank you kindly.
Sincerely,
Drew Parsons
Debian Developer