Bug#741303: libfeel++1: libfeelpp.so.1.0.0 links with both GPL-licensed and GPL-incompatible libraries

[Francesco Poli]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:52:34 +0100 Christophe Prud'homme wrote:

> Dear Francesco Poli

Hello Christophe,
thanks for commenting my bug report.

> 
> What is the state of this bug ? any progress with respect to scotch
> licensing ?

I am not aware of any progress: I am the bug report submitter and, as I
said in the original bug report, I need help from other people who
volunteer to get in touch with the upstream developer of SCOTCH and
persuade him to re-license SCOTCH under the LGPL.
I have already tried to do so in the past, but I failed to convince him
that there is an issue.

Please (re-)read https://bugs.debian.org/740463#5 for the full story.

Are you willing to help?

If so, please contact the main author of SCOTCH and explain the
licensing headaches he is causing to several other projects.
If you manage to persuade him (to get the necessary paperwork) to
re-license SCOTCH under the LGPL v2.1 or, at least, to dual-license it
under the GNU LGPL v2.1 or the CeCILL-C v1.0 (at the recipient's
choice), all the GPL-incompatibility issues will instantly vanish! 

> 
> this is a really painful situation !

Indeed.

> 
> are petsc and all libraries (based on umfpack) related to this bug issues
> marked for removal from testing ?

By looking at http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/autoremovals.cgi
it seems to me that feel++ and getdp are marked for auto-removal from
Debian testing, while other packages affected by SCOTCH licensing
issues are not (yet?) on the list.
I am not sure why (maybe because they are not leaf packages?).

The complete list of SCOTCH licensing bug reports is
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?archive=both;tag=scotch-license-issues;users=debian-science-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org

> 
> have you marked also octave with an RC bug ? it  uses suitesparse/umfpack
> and scotch [1]

Could you please elaborate?
I cannot spot the dependency of octave on scotch...

> Basically all libraries/programs using suitesparse/umfpack should have this
> bug, no ?

Only when they contain a file which (directly or indirectly) links with
both SCOTCH and some GPL-licensed library (such as UMFPACK)...

> I think Libreoffice/Openoffice  are using suitesparse(and scotch) and glpk
> so it should also have the RC bug.

libreoffice? glpk?
Could you please help me to find the dependency on scotch? I fail to
see it...

> 
> I guess that the technical solution would be to get rid of umfpack but then
> that would disrupt a lot of software !

I think I clearly illustrated the solutions that I consider as
acceptable: see my original bug report(s).
Solution (A) is the most desirable, that's why I called for help to
push in that direction...

I hope this clarifies.



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