[petsc-dev] NVIDIA licensing

[Barry Smith]

  There is no way to do do it consistently for all contributors, it would be a big mess plus it would miss all the history.

  If NVIDIA requires it to contribute then I see no harm in having those two lines in certain source files. It is not tracking provenance in any way, it is just a way to allow NVIDIA to check its check marks. 

  Barry



> On Sep 6, 2021, at 11:23 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
>>> 2) NVIDIA's lawyers have some thoughts that we will need to address 
> 
> When I saw this is, my thought was: ANL lawyers would be involved here [as generally employees couldn't respond to legal stuff]
> 
>>  git grep Copyright locates some files that are copyrighted by other groups (but fit within the BSD license) so I think it is fine to include the NVIDIA copyright information in appropriate files. 
> 
> My impression here was we are bundling some external stuff [yaml, abi-compliance-checker, khash, valgrid] - so in some sense they are still external stuff - not petsc native stuff - where we are to retain their copyright - as per terms of use.
> 
> So would 'SPDX' be similar module? It wasn't clear to me if - say any current petsc sources say src/ksp/pc/interface/pcregis.c gets updated as part of this work - would it also need this copyright update? Perhaps thats ok?
> 
> And if this a policy (for current petsc sources) - we should have to do this for all contributions to be consistent?
> 
> Satish
> 
> On Mon, 6 Sep 2021, Barry Smith wrote:
> 
>> 
>>  git grep Copyright locates some files that are copyrighted by other groups (but fit within the BSD license) so I think it is fine to include the NVIDIA copyright information in appropriate files. 
>> 
>>  We should also add some text to LICENSE indicating certain files have additional copyrights indicated at the top of the individual file.
>> 
>>  Barry
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sep 3, 2021, at 7:48 AM, Mark Adams <mfadams at lbl.gov> wrote:
>>> 
>>> All,
>>> 
>>> Matthew (cc'ed) and I are going to start working on an AMGx interface in PETSc, PCAMGX, and I suggested that he may want to think about moving the core AMG PC code into PETSC as a built-in PC.
>>> 
>>> 1) We would have to decide of we want the maintenance burden of moving the whole thing in, but we will probably start with a 3rd party library unless this move starts looking like a really good idea. We have not started to really dig into this.
>>> 
>>> 2) NVIDIA's lawyers have some thoughts that we will need to address even with a 3rd party library (I know Hypre has this license notification and LLNL seems happy with what we did).
>>> 
>>> First, Mathew says that this process "can open the door to us helping with PETSc more generally."
>>> 
>>> I will just quote the rest of Mathews' message:
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Mark
>>> 
>>> I can see you don't add license notifications to the headers of the source files, but this tends to be the approach we take for copyright. I'm also not sure there is a very good alternative?
>>> 
>>> Instead of the monolithic copying of the full BSD-2 license with the NVIDIA copyright (which I appreciate might not be desirable), would it be a suitable compromise if we used the SPDX identifier, which looks like:
>>> 
>>> // Copyright (c) 1991-2021, NVIDIA. All rights reserved.
>>> // Copyright (c) 1991-2021, UChicago Argonne, LLC and the PETSc Development Team. All rights reserved.
>>> // SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-clause
>>> 
>>> This would be for the main source files that we make any significant contributions to or author. I would be interested to hear your thoughts / ideas on this.
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>