Open Stack

Recently just doing a license analysis of the dependencies for the 
various projects and one popped up that seemed worth discussing.

rtslib is currently listed as a dependency for cinder. The package 
itself is AGPL, which has some rather strong requirements for a cloud 
provider using it 
(https://github.com/agrover/rtslib-fb/blob/master/COPYING).

It's currently used only in bin/cinder-rtstool, so it's largely isolated 
in it's use. However given that the spirit of the OpenStack project was 
Apache 2 style licensing, it's a bit odd to have an AGPL dependency that 
really means cinder-rtstool is AGPL (even though it says Apache2 in the 
header).

This was a grizzly addition that originally landed in test-requires here:

commit 1fc557561b711f6edb06cf28edb0f90900e2c21e
Author: Eric Harney <eharney at redhat.com>
Date:   Mon Dec 17 17:31:40 2012 -0500

     Add LIO iSCSI backend support using python-rtslib

     This patch enables LIO as an iSCSI backend for Cinder, using
     python-rtslib.

     To enable, set "iscsi_helper = lioadm" in cinder.conf.

     This requires python-rtslib 2.1.fb27, which is available from pip.

     Implements blueprint lio-iscsi-support
     DocImpact

     Change-Id: Ifb23de65f26a40997afd6148a1d0be39bcc8d196

And then moved to pip requires here:

commit 2443e35d8c2370f39f9bf0b3cda523103af3f261
Author: Chuck Short <chuck.short at canonical.com>
Date:   Mon Feb 18 08:03:32 2013 -0600

     Install rtslib when installing cinder

     It doesnt make sense to put rtslib in tools/test-requires
     since it is not directly using the python module while running
     the tests, since the tests use cinder-rtstool.

     Change-Id: Ib39b91e25f22b4943ef17eee50967828f7460b25
     Signed-off-by: Chuck Short <chuck.short at canonical.com>


My inclination is that tooling which requires AGPL libraries probably 
shouldn't be in the main OpenStack tree. Maybe externally available as 
some sort of contrib. However, licensing always opens up new cans of 
worms. So I'd like to hear other opinions here.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
IBM Linux Technology Center
email: sdague at linux.vnet.ibm.com
alt-email: sldague at us.ibm.com