[openstack-dev] rtslib dependency for cinder is AGPL - thoughts?

John Griffith john.griffith at solidfire.com
Mon Mar 18 20:37:40 UTC 2013


On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Sean Dague <sdague at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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Thanks for pointing this out Sean, not being a lawyer myself there are
some ramifications that I'm not overly clear on regarding AGPL.  One
possible solution is that since the LIO driver is an optional config
we could remove it from pip-requires and packaging and add information
to the install/config guide for folks that want to use LIO with a note
about the licensing.  If nothing else this may at least be prudent for
Grizzly.

To be honest I'll need to do a bit more research on AGPL, but I'll be
keen to get some input from folks on the ML who have more insight to
the legalities and wording of AGPL.

John



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