Hi, I hope I'm addressing the right list -- if not, please point me where it's appropriate.
We (Manila developers) plan to start a new side-project that would be hosted on Stackforge. It's tentatively named "Manila Image Project", although it would not necessarily be Manila specific. It's aim is to provide infrastructure for building custom VM images. So far so good. What we are puzzled on is the license. This is something we have to figure out before we think of setting up the project. In general it's understood that Apache License (v2) is preferred. Question: is that a strict requirement on Stackforge or just a suggestion? - Lot of related previous art are GPL/LGPL licensed in entirety or partially so we have to know if can use them. - Note that the image project is different from standard Openstack related projects because it's a "meta-tool", like a compiler: you don't deploy it on site, what you deploy is it's outcome (a VM image). - AFAIU #1: the VM image (the output of the tool) is considered to be a distribution of all the sofware contained in it, which means that an image builder has to comply with licensing of these software individually, and patches that are applied on the sources might be constrained in terms of licensing (if the source is covered by a copyleft license). So it's not feasible to have a pure APLv2 image builder anyway. What licensing of the image builder itself (ie. not the patches) has an impact on is the "scaffolding" bundled with the image (init scripts, etc). - AFAIU #2: the above concerns the one who would like to use and customize the image builder; regarding the end user who just receives and deploys the image, and applies changes/updates to it from the distributor of the image (if there is such a feature), the distributor is free to specify the terms of usage, as long as the image is made of open source software. Please correct / clarify / debunk / confirm my ideas above, and explain what is implied wrt. / required for eligibility of Stackforge hosting. Thanks, Csaba _______________________________________________ OpenStack-Infra mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-infra
