Open Stack

On 2019-12-09 11:22:39 -0500 (-0500), Monty Taylor wrote:
> > On Dec 9, 2019, at 10:54 AM, Sergey Sh <einarum at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> > 3. Move GPL modules to SIG repo in Openstack, to develop new
> > modules in Apache2 there.
> > 
> > I think because of partial incompatibility of Apache2 <-> GPLv3
> > licenses option 3 is barely viable
[...]

It depends on how you look at license compatibility. What's usually
expressed is the effective license terms of the work as a whole
(when disparate codebases are combined at runtime). It's not so much
that you're "including" some software in some other software, you're
just combining software with different but compatible licenses, and
the terms under which copyright is licensed for the combined work
tends to be a superset of the license terms for its constituent
parts.

> I don’t think 3 is really an option because there is a decent
> amount of shared code in the modules, and even though some of it
> needs a refactor, I think it would be stretching definitions in an
> extreme manner to not consider even the new modules “derived
> works”. I also think it would be confusing for people to
> understand the licensing of the repo in question for not much
> gain.
[...]

Yes, often when folks do this they talk about "clean room"
development practices where someone familiar with what the new piece
of software needs to do writes a specification and then someone else
who has never seen the original source code writes the replacement
from scratch, to avoid accidentally reusing novel algorithms from
the original which the developer might otherwise have impressed upon
their subconscious memory. That degree of paranoia may be overkill,
but I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. ;)
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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