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

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Tue Mar 19 14:51:19 UTC 2013


On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 16:30 -0400, Sean Dague 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).
> 
...
> 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.

Just to be clear on something here - our policy is to not allow the use
of any GPL libraries. And we don't know of any cases where we currently
use GPL libraries.

i.e. this is an issue with GPL libraries, generally. The fact that it's
specifically AGPL makes it a more "interesting" case, but that's more or
less secondary.

Have I got that right?

Cheers,
Mark.




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