On 2019-02-04 14:42:04 +0100 (+0100), Ilya Shakhat wrote:
> I am experimenting with automatic verification of code licenses of
> OpenStack projects and see that one of Rally dependencies has GPL3
> license
[...]
To start off, it looks like the license for morph is already known
to the Rally developers, based on the inline comment for it at
https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/rally/tree/requirements.txt?id=362…
(so hopefully this is no real surprise).
The source of truth for our licensing policies, as far as projects
governed by the OpenStack Technical Committee are concerned (which
openstack/rally is), can be found here:
https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/licensing.html
It has a carve out for "tools that are run with or on OpenStack
projects only during validation or testing phases of development"
which "may be licensed under any OSI-approved license" and since
the README.rst for Rally states it's a "tool & framework that allows
one to write simple plugins and combine them in complex tests
scenarios that allows to perform all kinds of testing" it probably
meets those criteria.
As for concern that a Python application which imports another
Python library at runtime inherits its license and so becomes
derivative of that work, that has been the subject of much
speculation. In particular, whether a Python import counts as
"dynamic linking" in GPL 3.0 section 1 is debatable:
https://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/41019-python-gplhttps://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1487/how-does-the-gpls-linki…https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/87446/using-a-gplv3…https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40492518/is-an-import-in-python-conside…
I'm most definitely not a lawyer, but from what I've been able to
piece together it's the combination of rally+morph which potentially
becomes GPLv3-licensed when distributed, not the openstack/rally
source code itself. This is really more of a topic for the
legal-discuss mailing list, however, so I am cross-posting my reply
there for completeness.
To readers only of the legal-discuss ML, the original post can be
found archived here:
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2019-February/002356…
--
Jeremy Stanley