Currently CloudStack has dependencies on third party software that are under 'excluded license' [1] or does not fall under category A/B licenses. While effort in underway [2] to remove the dependencies, I want to bring to the discussion on what is the best approach for CloudStack to remove the dependencies. As a orchestration software CloudStack deals/designed to deal with diverse set of Hypervisors, networking devices and file systems etc. While the core orchestration software can be made not to depend on the third party software which are not under ASF license, support for hypervisor etc might require dependency on thirty party software that are not under ASF friendly license. For e.g. in order to manage Vmware and Kvm hypervisors CloudStack is using Vmware and libvirt libraries. While support software for the Vmware/Kvm can treated as optional components of CloudStack, critical value comes from these optional components. Given this, following seems to some obvious options.
* Keep CloudStack code that integrates with third party libraries in the repo. But exclude it from the default build targets. Expect the users/developers to download the compile dependencies and modify the build settings to include the code. But this will take out the critical support for Vmware etc in the default build. * Have the compile tasks pull the dependent components from non-asf repo's. Apache Cassandra, Hadoop projects seems to have maven/ivy tasks to pull the compile dependencies on build from remote maven repos. Can third-party software that are not under ASF license can be hosted on remote repo? Perhaps mentors or any one who has knowledge of how other apache projects deal with such dependencies can share the knowledge. [1]http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.htm<http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html#category-x>l [2]http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-cloudstack-dev/201206.mbox/%3c35f04d4c394874409d9be4bf45ac5ea9fed4f25...@banpmailbox01.citrite.net%3E
