On Sun, May 06, 2018 at 08:00:53AM +0000, Lumin wrote: > On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 10:03:38AM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: > > > > On 2 May 2018 at 14:41, Lumin wrote: > > | Seems that things are getting more complicated. Recall that here we'are > > | going to prevent users from GPL violation in situations such as this > > | one: > > | > > | debootstrap; apt install libmkl-rt; apt install octave; octave ... (1) > > > > Are you sure? I do not think that is correct. Downloading and installating > > MKL, and running it with R or Octave (or any other package linking the BLAS > > interface) does not constitute a GPL violation AFAIK. > > Not sure. I admit that I'm not good at long licences such as GPL. > Whether it violates GPL or not, what we do in config/postinst won't > change: make sure it's the user's explicit choice to use MKL as the > default BLAS/LAPACK implementation, and in contrast, MKL will not be > used without the explicit choice. > > > (There may well be limitations on further redistribution of the aggregate > > even though even the MKL now limits redistribution as it is of course still a > > no-source-code piece of software.) > > Intel's ISSL license allows redistribution, as long as no file is > changed. Yes, but it’s the GPL that forbids distribution of a binary linking together GPL code and non-free code. I’m not entirely sure whether it is legal to locally have such a binary on your hard drive, that you would not redistribute (but anyways nobody will know). The problem is that, by providing GPL'd software (e.g. GNU Octave), MKL and a way to dynamically link the two together, one may consider that Debian is distributing such an binary and therefore violating the GPL. So at the very least we must clearly warn the user about that risk and not have MKL the default BLAS implementation. -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Sébastien Villemot ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ http://sebastien.villemot.name ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ http://www.debian.org
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