Open Stack

Hi,

I hope I'm addressing the right list -- if not, please point
me where it's appropriate.

We (Manila developers) plan to start a new side-project that would
be hosted on Stackforge. It's tentatively named "Manila Image Project",
although it would not necessarily be Manila specific.

It's aim is to provide infrastructure for building custom VM images.

So far so good.

What we are puzzled on is the license. This is something we have to
figure out before we think of setting up the project. In general it's
understood that Apache License (v2) is preferred. Question:
is that a strict requirement on Stackforge or just a suggestion?

- Lot of related previous art are GPL/LGPL licensed in entirety or
  partially so we have to know if can use them.

- Note that the image project is different from standard Openstack
  related projects because it's a "meta-tool", like a compiler:
  you don't deploy it on site, what you deploy is it's outcome
  (a VM image).

- AFAIU #1: the VM image (the output of the tool) is considered to be
  a distribution of all the sofware contained in it, which means that
  an image builder has to comply with licensing of these software
  individually, and patches that are applied on the sources might be
  constrained in terms of licensing (if the source is covered by a
  copyleft license). So it's not feasible to have a pure 
  APLv2 image builder anyway. What licensing of the image builder
  itself (ie. not the patches) has an impact on is the "scaffolding"
  bundled with the image (init scripts, etc).

- AFAIU #2: the above concerns the one who would like to use and customize
  the image builder; regarding the end user who just receives and deploys 
  the image, and applies changes/updates to it from the distributor
  of the image (if there is such a feature), the distributor is free
  to specify the terms of usage, as long as the image is made of open
  source software.

Please correct / clarify / debunk / confirm my ideas above, and
explain what is implied wrt. / required for eligibility of Stackforge
hosting.

Thanks,
Csaba