This is non-free software written by George Karypis et al. and copyrighted by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. It was downloaded from http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/metis/ and Debianized by Adam Powell on March 10, 2003. The included copyright notice follows, along with the email sent by Dr. Karypis authorizing distribution with Debian. Copyright Notice ---------------- Copyright 1997-2003, Regents of the University of Minnesota The ParMETIS/METIS package is copyrighted by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. It can be freely used for educational and research purposes by non-profit institutions and US government agencies only. Other organizations are allowed to use ParMETIS/METIS only for evaluation purposes, and any further uses will require prior approval. The software may not be sold or redistributed without prior approval. One may make copies of the software for their use provided that the copies, are not sold or distributed, are used under the same terms and conditions. As unestablished research software, this code is provided on an ``as is'' basis without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. The downloading, or executing any part of this software constitutes an implicit agreement to these terms. These terms and conditions are subject to change at any time without prior notice. X-UIDL: p0/"!p*Q"!cBh!!$<-"! X-Mozilla-Status: 0013 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Envelope-to: hazelsct@lyre.mit.edu Received: from fort-point-station.mit.edu ([18.7.7.76]) by lyre.mit.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 192XKR-0008FG-00 for ; Mon, 07 Apr 2003 10:10:31 -0400 Received: from mhub-w2.tc.umn.edu (mhub-w2.tc.umn.edu [160.94.160.45]) by fort-point-station.mit.edu (8.12.4/8.9.2) with ESMTP id h37EAUal002913 for ; Mon, 7 Apr 2003 10:10:30 -0400 (EDT) Received: from PetrosII (falcon.cs.umn.edu [160.94.179.138] (may be forged)) by mhub-w2.tc.umn.edu with ESMTP for hazelsct@mit.edu; Mon, 7 Apr 2003 09:10:30 -0500 (CDT) From: "George Karypis" To: "'Adam C Powell IV'" Subject: RE: Distributing ParMETIS with Debian Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 09:08:07 -0500 Message-ID: <001b01c2fd0f$1d44a550$f88010ac@PetrosII> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_001C_01C2FCE5.346E9D50" X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4024 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 In-Reply-To: <3E907557.8050800@mit.edu> Importance: Normal X-Umn-Remote-Mta: [N] falcon.cs.umn.edu #+HF+LO X-UIDL: p0/"!p*Q"!cBh!!$<-"! Status: U This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_001C_01C2FCE5.346E9D50 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Adam, Yes, you have my permission to include ParMetis's source and binary distributions on Debian's mirror sites. George -----Original Message----- From: Adam C Powell IV [mailto:hazelsct@mit.edu] Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2003 1:44 PM To: George Karypis Cc: James Troup Subject: Re: Distributing ParMETIS with Debian Hello, Thank you again for granting permission to upload ParMETIS into Debian. I successfully built packages and uploaded them, but they were rejected by the archive manager, because we need to make certain of your approval for one thing not mentioned in my original message: Do you approve of the posting of ParMETIS source and binary packages on the 800+ Debian mirror servers around the world, as a means of delivery to our users? Also, I made an error in my original message: because of its non-free status, my ParMETIS packages will not be automatically built for the eleven processor architectures mentioned. I personally have the facilities to build packages for the IA-32, Alpha, PowerPC and ARM architectures, and plan to do so; when a Debian release approaches, I might also use some of the project's machines to built the final release binary packages for other popular computing architectures such as IA-64 (Itanium), Sparc, HP PA-RISC and S/390. And the package source will be available for people to build their own packages on whatever architecture they please. Again, thank you, and I will keep you informed of the package's progress. George Karypis wrote: Adam, Sure, go ahead and include ParMetis in Debian. There are a couple outstanding bugs with the current release of ParMetis that I will be fixing soon, but the changes will be minimal. George -----Original Message----- From: Adam C Powell IV [mailto:hazelsct@mit.edu] Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2003 1:42 PM To: metis@cs.umn.edu Subject: Distributing ParMETIS with Debian Greetings, I am writing to request your permission to distribute ParMETIS with Debian GNU/Linux. Debian (http://www.debian.org/) is an all-volunteer distribution of the Linux kernel with thousands of accompanying software packages, similar to but much larger than RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Lindows, etc. (in fact, Lindows is based on Debian's free packages). I am one of the ~850 volunteer maintainers of Debian; I maintain the PETSc and Babel packages among others. Because PETSc can link to ParMETIS, I would like to be able to include it in the Debian distribution. [I am aware of the work of Eray Ozkural to package METIS for Debian, as I was his mentor and sponsor when he was doing that work as part of the process of becoming a Debian maintainer. Unfortunately, for various reasons his application to become a maintainer was rejected, and his packages including METIS removed. This will thus be a new packaging effort by an already-approved maintainer.] Debian packages are grouped according to the "freedom" of software licenses. Since the ParMETIS license is not "free" by Debian standards (http://www.debian.org/intro/free ; basically the same as the Open Source Definition), it would go ino the "non-free" section of Debian, which would alert potential users that copying and usage are restricted, so they should check the copyright file for such terms. (The other two sections are "main", consisting entirely of free software, and "contrib", consisting of free software which depends on non-free software, e.g. when PETSc linking to ParMETIS is uploaded, its dependency on non-free ParMETIS will require moving it into contrib.) In every ParMETIS package (static libs, shared libs, documentation, etc.), your copyright conditions would appear as the file /usr/share/doc/parmetis*/copyright , and users would be bound by those terms just as if they downloaded ParMETIS from your website. When/if I receive your permission, I will upload into the Debian archive the pristine ParMETIS source tarball, together with a gzipped patch containing the Debian packaging, and a third small file with MD5 checksums of the first two and a list of Debian packages required to build ParMETIS binaries; this third file will be GPG-signed by me to guarantee the integrity of all three files. I would thus become the "Debian maintainer" of the ParMETIS package, in the same way as I am the maintainer of packages for PETSc, Babel, Surface Evolver, and installers for the Compaq Alpha Linux compilers. With your permission, I would like to make some small changes, such as building a shared ParMETIS library, and fixing any bugs I might find. I will inform you in advance of any such changes, and you will be able to exercise as much or as little control over these changes as you like. The Debian packaging mentioned above consists of a set of scripts and definition files for the building of binary Debian packages based on the source code. Taken together, these files serve a similar purpose to the spec file for creating RedHat .rpm packages, but with considerably more flexibility. The binary Debian packages will then be built by autobuilder machines for all of the target architectures, which currently include: IA-32, IA-64, Alpha, Sparc, PowerPC, M68K (yes, there are still a bunch of Amiga users around :-), MIPS (big- and little-endian), ARM, S/390 and PA-RISC; support for Hitachi SuperH and alternate kernels on some of these architectures is in the works. This packaging will make ParMETIS and packages which depend on it considerably easier to use, by allowing users to download, say, a parallel fluid dynamics package named "fluids" by typing "apt-get install fluids", which would download and install fluids, the ParMETIS library, and all other support libraries required to run fluids. Users (who run Debian) will not need to compile or link anything, this work will all be done in advance. If you (and the University of Minnesota) agree to the above, I will begin working on the Debian packaging for ParMETIS, and when that packaging is complete, will inform you and upload it into Debian. This will place ParMETIS in the "unstable" distribution immediately, and when it meets several criteria (no build failures on any architecture, no bugs of severity serious or higher, 10 days since upload into unstable), it will be moved into the "testing" distribution. If the package is in the "testing" distribution when a release is made, it will be included in that "stable" distribution release. Independent of your decision regarding Debian, I would like to request that you (U.Mn. etc.) make the METIS family available under a free/open source license of some kind. For example, the Babel SIDL compiler is released under the GNU Lesser General Public license, which among other things, eliminates the need for this sort of permission request for Debian redistribution (though I am in frequent contact with Babel's authors, and consulted them before my initial upload), and also allows me to patch it in various ways important to my users. In your case, you might be more interested in the GNU General Public License, which would not allow linking into proprietary software packages. (As the copyright holder, you could also license *METIS to companies under separate conditions.) As another example, I have simplified linking of the PETSc libraries with C++ code without the extra disk space and build time required by the authors' C++ scheme, and patched a problem in PETSc's timestepping code; both of those patches were sent to the PETSc authors. Thus open source licensing adds value to PETSc, as it does for such well-known software as Linux, Apache, Mozilla, GNOME, OpenOffice, autoconf/automake/libtool, etc., and could do the same for ParMETIS. Thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you will approve of my request to package and distribute ParMETIS with Debian, and that you will give serious consideration to open source licensing of ParMETIS. Sincerely, -- Adam Powell http://lyre.mit.edu/~powell/ Thomas B. King Assistant Professor of Materials Engineering 77 Massachusetts Ave. Rm. 4-117 Phone (617) 452-2086 Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Fax (617) 253-5418 ------=_NextPart_000_001C_01C2FCE5.346E9D50 Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable [removed to avoid having to read "MSHTML" formatted material] ------=_NextPart_000_001C_01C2FCE5.346E9D50--