Re: SuperLU-mt

[Drew Parsons <dparsons@debian.org>]

On Sun, 2018-05-20 at 16:12 -0700, Dima Kogan wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I'm working on Sundials right now, and I noticed that Debian ships
> the
> non-parallelized SuperLU (in "libsuperlu..." packages) but not the
> multi-threaded superlu-mt. Upstream:
> 
>   http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~xiaoye/SuperLU/
> 
> Does anybody know if there's some specific reason for this (funny
> licensing, for instance) or if simply nobody has needed it? The
> license
> LOOKS fine.


I haven't looked specifically at SuperLU-MT. I never packaged it
because my packages don't use it (or at least, don't need to use it). 

But one problem that SuperLU and SuperLU-Dist have in common is that
they both use mc64, which is explicitly non-free, "shall not pass this
code directly to a third party without the express prior consent of the
authors".  As far as I can tell SuperLU has no permission to
redistribute mc64. Perhaps they did get express consent to redistribute
but that hasn't been communicated or extended to us.

What we've had to do is remove the mc64 code (i.e. we're using dfsg
source tarballs).  SuperLU carries on without it but it basically
cripples SuperLU-Dist.  I'm hoping someone will notice and complain,
and either encourage Sherry to change the code in the SuperLUs, or
encourage HSL to provide a free exception to the licence for mc64.

Drew