Clarification about LICENSE

[sagitter]

Hi all.

licensecheck tool recognizes psblas3's LICENSE as CMU license

Do you confirm that the psblas3-3.9.0 license is MIT-CMU?

[sfilippone]

Hmm. The license was originally drafted to conform to the 3-clause BSD https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause I wonder why the tool says it's a CMU. Salvatore

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On Sun, Mar 8, 2026 at 7:36 PM Antonio ***@***.***> wrote: *sagitter* created an issue (sfilippone/psblas3#37) <#37> Hi all. licensecheck tool recognizes psblas3's LICENSE <https://github.com/sfilippone/psblas3/blob/development/LICENSE> as CMU license <https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT-CMU.html> Do you confirm that the psblas3-3.9.0 license is MIT-CMU? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#37>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AD274T4TX34XCN3UIGZ4T4L4PW4SFAVCNFSM6AAAAACWLDACM6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZUGA2DCOJRGA3DAMY> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[LecrisUT]

https://tools.spdx.org/app/check_license/ is identifying it as BSD-3-Clause. The only suspicious thing is the copyright part being in a quite non-standard format

[sfilippone]

https://tools.spdx.org/app/check_license/ is identifying it as BSD-3-Clause. The only suspicious thing is the copyright part being in a quite non-standard format

So, it should be changed to soemthing like this

    (C) Copyright 2025         Salvatore Filippone    Alfredo Buttari      
 

[LecrisUT]

We narrowed down the issue was the missing prior word, which is required according to https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html.

The copyright text using a more standard format would also be welcome. I don't have at hand a document about this format, but at least the template in the license is ok

[pombredanne]

ScanCode [1] detects this alright, so this is a bug in licensecheck.

But while discussing licenses, also that there is more to it than meet the eyes. psblas3 LICENSE is a BSD-3-Clause alright, but the bulk of the code in [2] has GPL notices, but there is a top license in [3] that says this is a BSD-2-Clause.

[1] https://github.com/aboutcode-org/scancode-toolkit/
[2] https://github.com/sfilippone/psblas3/tree/development/cuda/spgpu
[3] https://github.com/sfilippone/psblas3/blob/development/cuda/License-spgpu.md

[sfilippone]

Ok, that is an historical quirk. To explain the situation: SPGPU was originally a separate piece of code, written independently by one of my students. I later asked him if he was willing to switch to BSD in case I wanted to introduce it in the main library, and he agreed, so apparently the switch was incomplete. Not sure how to fix this, though.

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On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 2:18 PM Philippe Ombredanne < ***@***.***> wrote: *pombredanne* left a comment (sfilippone/psblas3#37) <#37 (comment)> ScanCode [1] detects this alright, so this is a bug in licensecheck. But while discussing licenses, also that there is more to it than meet the eyes. psblas3 LICENSE is a BSD-3-Clause alright, but the bulk of the code in [2] has GPL notices, but there is a top license in [3] that says this is a BSD-2-Clause. [1] https://github.com/aboutcode-org/scancode-toolkit/ [2] https://github.com/sfilippone/psblas3/tree/development/cuda/spgpu [3] https://github.com/sfilippone/psblas3/blob/development/cuda/License-spgpu.md — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#37 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AD274T4Y5HBEMGT6ZRT7S4D4QFRSPAVCNFSM6AAAAACWLDACM6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHM2DAMZZGE2TEMRVGE> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[pombredanne]

@LecrisUT re:

The copyright text using a more standard format would also be welcome. I don't have at hand a document about this format, but at least the template in the license is ok

@sfilippone FWIW, ScanCode detects the copyrights correctly here. My 2 cents, having built an NLP lexer and grammar to parse and detect copyrights, would be, if you want to best separate multiple holders, to create one copyright per line like that:

Copyright (C) 2006-2018 Salvatore Filippone
Copyright (C) 2006-2018 Alfredo Buttari

[pombredanne]

@sfilippone re: #37 (comment)

if the student could chime in, or if you have some email confirmation that should do it?

[davidebarbieri]

Hello, original spgpu license is defined in this repository (the original one): https://github.com/davidebarbieri/spgpu/blob/development/License.md

It was meant to be a BSD 2-clause style license, and it was just an arbitrary decision of mine
after noticing myself the license file was missing.
Then, @sfilippone verified it was a 2-clause BSD and compliant with the use and inclusion in a library with a BSD 3-clause style license (being basically the same license with an additional restriction). Then, proceeded to integrate spgpu in psblas.

No experience on automated license checkers, but having a BSD2 licensed software inside a BSD3 licensed software
should be perfectly fine.

[LecrisUT]

About the overall licensing the main issue is to clarify what the state is:

• Is spgpu meant to be re-licensed as BSD-3-clause or remaining as BSD-2-clause
  • If it is re-licensed, then the license file should reflect that. But doing so properly and ethically is tricky since you do need the approval of all git authors who have contributed. A grey area could be if you can skip the authors if their surviving code is empty, but that is hard to figure out
• There are still GPL license as specified by @pombredanne, example:
  

  psblas3/cuda/spgpu/core.h

  Lines 9 to 11 in e2ddc08

  	* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  	* modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
  	* version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

  
  That thing is much more questionable. Where did those come from, and what was the intent with it? The original author seem to have been @davidebarbieri, so it could be that it was meant to be relicensed, but again as noted above, doing that is tricky
• You can have multiple licenses for code bits that are differently licensed and join them as SPDX with AND. Would be good to at least specify the overall license in the README. You can split the license of the source and runtime, e.g. a script or CMake code would not propagate to the runtime license (unless there's some weird license that actually specifies it)

[davidebarbieri]

Ok, got the problem (sorry but I worked on this mostly 16 years ago).
There was some confusion carried by the fact that the original code was made by me and stored on Google Code before its closing;
and the fact I stopped working on it for years before @sfilippone asked me permission to integrate it into psblas.
I guess back then I noticed there was no License file and thought I just forgot to add it - so just chose BSD2 -
but now I see a license was there, written in every single file.

I guess the easy fix is removing the old GPL from every file (and BSD2) and just relicensing as BSD3.
I know it's generally painful tricky, but in this case it should be easy as me and @sfilippone were the only contributors to spgpu.

[sfilippone]

So, do we have an agreement on what to do? The code was INTENDED to be relicensed under BSD, which would be fine in this context. Davide has updated the original spgu repository, I can update all the files in the release, if that is acceptable. Pls. let me know S.

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On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 6:25 PM Davide Barbieri ***@***.***> wrote: *davidebarbieri* left a comment (sfilippone/psblas3#37) <#37 (comment)> Ok, got the problem (sorry but I worked on this mostly 16 years ago). There was some confusion carried by the fact that the original code was made by me and stored on Google Code before its closing; and the fact I stopped working on it for years before @sfilippone <https://github.com/sfilippone> asked me permission to integrate it into psblas. I guess back then I noticed there was no License file and thought I just forgot to add it - so just chose BSD2 - but now I see a license was there, written in every single file. I guess the easy fix is removing the old GPL from every file (and BSD2) and just relicensing as BSD3. I know it's generally painful tricky, but in this case it should be easy as me and @sfilippone <https://github.com/sfilippone> were the only contributors to spgpu. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#37 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AD274T5ZSQT6S7A2JEUQ7GT4QGORDAVCNFSM6AAAAACWLDACM6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHM2DANBQHA2DONRUG4> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[LecrisUT]

• Re GPL in spgu, that sounds reasonable, but please be pedantically careful about it. At first glance I do see another author in the commits, a Samuel Murdoch
• Re BSD-3-Clause license text, please check that you are missing the word prior as noted before

Those two things are the main things that will help us in the packaging

[davidebarbieri]

@LecrisUT Samuel Murdoch is still me, it was a fantasy name from when I was a teenager,
as you can see here:
https://art.torvergata.it/retrieve/e291c0d4-6fc9-cddb-e053-3a05fe0aa144/RR.pdf
I regrettably still used that email address for some time during the university years.