SVC(kernel="linear") for dense and sparse matrices differ significantly [renamed by amueller]

I compare the performance between SVC(kernel="linear") and LinearSVC. The difference is very large. LinearSVC is far better than SVC(kernel="linear"). The code is in https://gist.github.com/4294378. I also test with the original LibSVM toolkit; its performance is close to LinearSVC under 5-fold cross validation.

I don't think it is expected from a user's perspective.