Open Stack

On 03/19/2013 01:31 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-03-19 at 13:27 -0400, Sean Dague wrote:
>> On 03/19/2013 10:51 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>>> 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 wasn't sure if that was formal policy or not, but if it is, I'm happy
>> with that. If that's the case though, it got missed in at least one
>> instance here by rtslib coming in as a cinder dependency.
>
> To be clear, I'm really not sure whether this is our policy either. I
> guess I always assumed it was, but that's based on nothing substantive.

This would be a good thing for the TC to formalize, because it sounds 
right for the project culture, and would be good to make it something 
that's formal and we all review for.

	-Sean

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