[moody20@llnl.gov: Re: Startup-Protocol of MVAPICH-1.0]

[Pete Wyckoff]

frank.mietke at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de wrote on Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:35 +0100:
> I've done some patching work to integrate latest startup protocol of MVAPICH-1.0
> into mpiexec code. They changed the startup mechanism completely into some
> kind of opcode based protocol and use some self-written collective operations.
> It seems that this new approach is more scalable than the older ones.

Great news that you have done this work.  I'm sure many will
appreciate it.

> It was only little effort to patch but I would completely reuse some files from
> MVAPICH-1.0 directly where the collective stuff was implemented. Therefore I asked 
> the author of these files about licensing. I could not speak on behalf of you. 

You might give a thought to how we can make sure that mpiexec
continues to run all versions of mvapich in the future, as they
change the contents of their copy of the startup protocol file.  I
haven't looked to see if it is versioned, or if there is some other
way to detect and adapt to changes.  Maybe you could suggest
improvements to the mvapich guys if there is something we need.

> Please, could you answer Adam?
[..]
> From: Adam Moody <moody20 at llnl.gov>
> To: Frank Mietke <frank.mietke at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de>
> Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:40:56 -0700
> Subject: Re: Startup-Protocol of MVAPICH-1.0
> 
> Frank Mietke wrote:
>> I'm currently integrating the latest startup protocol of MVAPICH-1.0 into the
>> mpiexec project (look at: http://www.osc.edu/~pw/mpiexec/index.php).
>> Therefore I would (re)use your contribution pmgr_collective_common.[ch] and
>> pmgr_collective_mpirun.[ch]. Do you agree that we reuse your code inside the
>> mpiexec project under GPLv2?
>
> Thanks for asking.  I'm working now to establish the license for the 
> PMGR_COLLECTIVE software.  Since MVAPICH is released under BSD, I'm looking 
> at going with that.  I'm not familiar with GPLv2.  If I assign BSD 
> licensing to PMGR_COLLECTIVE, would that be ok for you?

My naive understanding of licensing is that it is acceptable for me
to continue to release mpiexec as GPLv2 while it includes a
BSD-licensed source file.  This is the idea of "compatibility" that
the gnu people talk about, and they list the FreeBSD license as
being compatible here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html .
I'm assuming that's the license you mean, and not the old
BSD-with-advertising clause.  What's in LICENSE.TXT in older mvapich
looks fine.  Frank can just glue that to the top of the source file.

Thanks all.

		-- Pete