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[RFC] [Licensing] Address ASF Feedback for 1.9.0.rc7 release #20616
Description
Problem statement
Based on the feedback from ASF on our vote to release MXNet v1.9.0.rc7, we still have a few licensing issues that caused a -1 vote, which prevents us from moving forward with the release.
Based on the RC7 voting thread, the following licensing issues are still outstanding:
-
Files incorrectly have ASF headers. These files are all copyrighted by NumPy developers and released under the 3-clause BSD license. We should not have added the ASF header and kept the original license headers intact, and mention this by including it in the "3-clause BSD license" section in LICENSE.
- src/operator/numpy/np_einsum_op.cc
- src/operator/numpy/np_einsum_op-inl.h
- src/operator/numpy/np_einsum_path_op-inl.h
-
Some files are not correctly listed in LICENSE. For example, these files contain a "Copyright Microsoft" line but are released under ASF-2 or MIT license. These need to be properly mentioned in LICENSE:
- src/operator/contrib/deformable_psroi_pooling.cu
- src/operator/contrib/deformable_psroi_pooling-inl.h
- src/operator/contrib/deformable_psroi_pooling.cc
- src/operator/contrib/multi_proposal-inl.h
- src/operator/contrib/multi_proposal.cc
- src/operator/contrib/multi_proposal.cu
- src/operator/contrib/psroi_pooling.cc
- src/operator/contrib/psroi_pooling.cu
- Additional files in the same situation as above (identified by running skywalking-eyes):
- src/operator/contrib/psroi_pooling-inl.h
- src/operator/contrib/deformable_convolution-inl.h
- src/operator/contrib/deformable_convolution.cc
- src/operator/contrib/deformable_convolution.cu
As ASF noted, not all files were checked and there could be others that are missed. In order to better identify licensing issues in the future, we should extend the use of automated tools (such as skywalking-eyes).
- Update our CI pipelines to utilize the latest Apache tool for license checks (skywalking-eyes)
- Update our automated tools to detect files that have multiple license headers
- Create/extend current tool(s) to ensure files are correctly listed in the correct section in LICENSE #20723
- Properly document 3rd-party files/symlinks in include directory in LICENSE
Activity
josephevans commentedon Sep 28, 2021
I've created a PR (#20598) to address the first three items and the last item (and checked as complete.) Please review with any comments/suggestions/concerns. This PR also adds a Github workflow (thanks to @barry-jin for help) to use Apache's latest license checking tool, skywalking-eyes.
josephevans commentedon Sep 29, 2021
I manually checked all source files in
src/operatorto ensure they are either:LICENSELICENSEunder the compatible license section (ie BSD 2/3-clause, MIT, etc.)Any help manually auditing the rest of the source tree would be greatly appreciated.
[v1.9.x] license updates (#20598)
[v1.9.x] license updates (apache#20598)
[v1.x] Backport #20598 (#20622)
barry-jin commentedon Oct 1, 2021
I have manually checked all the header files in include/onednn(mkldnn), include/dlpack, include/dmlc, include/mshadow and found one more issue:
josephevans commentedon Oct 7, 2021
I'm currently having issues getting #20626 to pass CI because of MKLDNN-related tests - opened an issue (#20643) to track.
josephevans commentedon Oct 7, 2021
I looked into the
license_header.pyscript, and it actually will detect when a file has multiple licenses and throw an error. We may need to expand the list of strings it recognizes licenses with here:https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/blob/v1.9.x/tools/license_header.py#L62-L63
josephevans commentedon Oct 26, 2021
At this point, we have manually reviewed all the source files in
srcto ensure they are properly ASF-2.0 licensed, or licensed under a difference license and mentioned inLICENSE. We also added another CI pipeline to run the skywalking-eyes license checker and identified a few minor license typos (such as extra characters accidentally added to license headers.)Since we don't believe there are any additional outstanding license issues, I think we should move forward with the v1.9.0 release. Does anyone have comments or issues?
szha commentedon Oct 27, 2021
Thanks Joe and Zhenghui and others who helped on the efforts in thoroughly addressing the license issues. Also thanks to @kezhenxu94 for sharing the great license checker tool from the skywalking community. I have a question from reviewing the LICENSE file from the master branch:
josephevans commentedon Oct 28, 2021
Thanks for the feedback @szha. I addressed the two issues you list above in #20709. I also audited the LICENSE file in v1.x branch and ensured everything listed is in the proper section.
After reading through https://infra.apache.org/licensing-howto.html, I also wanted to ensure that we comply to licensing terms for binary distributions - we need to include any copyright clauses and provide the associated license text in any binary distribution of MXNet. In order to achieve this, I created a number of LICENSE.*.txt files that includes the required text. These files should automatically get included in pip wheels (see https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/blob/v1.x/tools/pip/setup.py#L94-L95) to fulfill terms. This is how the TVM project includes license text, although MXNet has many more files under different licenses.
I would appreciate a review or comments on this approach.
josephevans commentedon Nov 2, 2021
Created a PR for the v1.9.x branch: #20722
josephevans commentedon Nov 3, 2021
Once #20722 is merged, I would like to close this issue and move forward with 1.9.0.rc8. I've converted the single outstanding task of updating the license tool to a new item for tracking (#20723).
szha commentedon Nov 3, 2021
josephevans commentedon Nov 4, 2021
Merged #20726 into v1.9.x, we should be ready for another release candidate. Closing this issue.