OK - so hoping to inject some clarification to this discussion - maybe it will make more sense.
Lets start with definitions, and I'll try and use caps when referring to this definitions. LEGAL - when I talk about legal problems below I refer to liability incurred by individuals in the project, especially the release manager, or the foundation itself. There are precious few real legal issues in this particular discussion, but many legal POLICY issues. POLICY - The ASF has a number of policy, including legal policies. Some of these exist for 'LEGAL' reasons as defined above, some of these are expectation/branding. There are precious few real LEGAL issues in this particular discussion, but many legal POLICY issues. So the legal POLICY says that we may not depend and automatically download GPL (or other Cat X) software. This is not necessarily because of LEGAL problems. (But does help the ASF avoid them) We clearly have a dependency on a number of GPL things - Linux, MySQL, KVM, XenServer, etc. The difference is that we don't automatically download those during the build of the project. E.g. people have to make a conscious decision to consume copyleft (or proprietary) software. It's fine for that decision to be mandatory (POLICY calls this a system requirement) but we don't allow people to be 'surprised' by ensuring that this is a conscious decision. Part of this is the expectation that the ASF releases permissively licensed software - 'sneaking' copyleft software in as a dependency is a bad thing for people whose expectation is otherwise; which brings us back to requiring the explicit action for such system requirements. The FLOSS exception is a moot point IMO unless VP Legal gives us a waiver; and I am not inclined to seek it out. The problem I see with the exception is that it deals with open source projects and not potential downstream consumers who might fork or release under another license. IMO Damoder has the right idea - we should specify that this is provided. I'll work on getting a patch that takes care of this in shortly. --David
