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Subject: [boost] Mathias Gaunard / NumScale relationship
From: Joel FALCOU (joel.falcou_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-04-08 15:00:54


Hi Niall, hi Andrey,

I'm taking on to send you an email in private w/r to your questions on
the list regarding Boost.SIMD, Mathias Gaunard and its relationship with
NumScale. I'm adding Michael in CC: as he knows about the whole ordeal
already and will corroborate my claims.

Mathias has been one of the engineer I hired and then associate with to
fund MetaScale, the company that will later become NumScale. He let the
company after being ousted by one of our early investor for basically
running the company into the wall and generally not knowing how to do
business. He left for Bloomberg and started actually speaking about
Boost.SIMD *as if* the internal information he gathered from within
NumScale could be released to the public without our consent inclding
internal benchmark report and road-map information. I imagine you
understand why the cease&desist letter was then send.

We have a bunch of other people using Boost.SIMD and they're doing fine
(including other company and a bunch of OS project). I dont see why
we'll be suing people using our open source software, which is different
from using piece of the software he should not have.

Since being laid off, Mathias kept trying to make our company and effort
within open source fails by playing the victim and basically retelling
history as he see fit. Also note that Mathias verbally threaten me that
he will make this review a failure for us.

This is the factual story of the whole thing:

- 2003-2006 I worked in my PhD on something called E.V.E which was a
EDSL in C++ able to supp0rot SIMD operations on PPC Altivec.
- 2008 I'm now an assistant professor and work on a project called NT2
(that has been spoken about on the list a bunch of time) in
collaboration with Jean-Thierry Lapresté which works on a huge amount of
libm vectorisation code. Inside NT2, a remnant of E.V.E lingers and get
worked on to support x86.
- 2010 or some such, We start isolating the SIMD layer from NT2. At the
same time, the university authorizes the release and open exploitation
of NT2 as a whole in open source. NT2 and its internal soon-to-be
Boost.SIMD is released under a Boost Licence.
  - around 2011, *I hire* Mathias to work on some part of NT2 and
related project that culminates in 2012 at the creation of MetaScale.
  - We start speaking of NT2 and Boost.SIMD separately and it's probably
around this time I raise the idea to make an actual submission to Boost.
  - 2014 for reasons that has no value being exposed here, Mathias
leaves MetaScale and NumScale is funded to replace it.
  - 2015 The amount of people actively working on NT2 plummets and
NumScale's team decide to reuse parts of Boost.SIMD into what bSIMD will
become.
  - 2016 the rewrite is complete and the lack of support on NT2 make me
pull the plug on the project. NumScale decide to open source back some
parts of bSIMD, leaving this new Boost.SIMD made out of bSIMD be the
sole remnant of this.

And as your concerns goes Andrey about NumScale blocking PR or w/e
coming into Boost.SIMD, The key point here is that Mathias is no longer
affiliated with NumScale and has no information nor actual reason to
speak on our behalf. NumScale has no plan to at short term release ITS
OWN support for some architectures. This does not preclude anybody
trying to undertake the effort to support an other architecture as long
as yes, it is not Mathias pulling up the files we own he scavenged
before leaving. We had had someone from ETH Zurich starting a port on
QPX, something we also started but never finished due to other
constraints. If this ever completes then, yeah it'll probably go inside
the Open Source version if it's of enough good quality.

We have various plan and discussion going on with different vendor and
open sourcing more is planned at later date and depending on things I
can not legally speak of because NDA.

I'm planning to write or have Michael answer those issues publicly in a
way I don't spread too much information that has nothing to do in
public. I would appreciate if this line of discussion stay private for
now until we address this properly in public.

Meanwhile, I'm open to answer your other question.

Best regards

Joel


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