The ASF recently made the determination that the org.json license is category x, meaning projects can’t release code that depends on it (the short reason is the license has a “no evil” clause that is inappropriate for a license).
Storm is largely unaffected since we use json-simple or Jackson in most places (we got off lucky, there are some other projects that are facing a world of hurt). However, the twitter4j library directly includes the org.json which makes that library category x as well. The only place the twitter4j dependency is used is in the `PrintSampleStream` example in storm-starter. Because of this, we can’t release. There’s an ongoing discussion on legal-discuss@ talking about setting a grace period for removing that dependency. That would allow projects to release with the dependency up to a cut-off date. There’s no decision yet as to what the date would be, but there appears to be momentum for the license to be “grandfathered” for a period. The two dates mentioned so far are 12/31/16 and 6/1/17. There’s also an effort to get the twitter4j to solve the issue by switching parsers. There are a number of approaches we could take, the simplest being to just remove that example. But until the twitter4j library is fixed, or a policy decision is reached regarding the grace period, we can’t release. What are others’ opinions on addressing this? I’m leaning toward just removing the code for now. It’s a very small amount of non-critical code, and could always be brought back if the situation changes. -Taylor
