Hi, To follow up slightly... Various reasonable and education people have differing opinions on what constitutes creating a derived work means in the context of LGPL and GPL. The ASF has taken one position. If you choose to ship HBase with the LZO library, you should check with your lawyer to see what terms you should offer it as. You should also balance this against the business risk you are willing to take. But you won't be able to call it "Apache HBase now with more LZO", since you are forking and re-licensing HBase. Again, check with your legal here.
Good luck! -ryan On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Ryan Rawson <[email protected]> wrote: > please ask your lawyer. > > On Jan 5, 2011 11:42 AM, "Sean" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hi HBasers, >> We are working on a product shipping to our customer as a commercial >> product, which is unlike most of you guys who use it as an in-house tool and >> build solution on top of it internally. Therefore, here I have a specific >> question about GPL licensing issue about the LZO codec. (It is definitely >> not a concern to most of you guys, but I'd doubt check here) >> >> First, here is how we use HBase. All of our development work is in >> application level, i.e., our business logic code runs within the JVM that an >> HBase client runs on (we have some M/R code, but MR task JVMs are also >> simply HBase clients, so I'd say it's same as my Put/Delete HBase logic). >> I understand that the LZO codec and its Java wrapper are GPL licensed. And >> my limited understanding toward GPL is that "you are required to GPL your >> code, i.e., open the source of it, if you link your logic to the GPL >> modules", but you are not required to do so if your server communicate to >> the GPL component with RPC/HTTP and etc. >> Here is my understanding but I am not really sure about it: 1) >> RegionServer is the process that uses ('links to') the LZO codec, and the >> JVM that HBase client runs in communicates with RS (the process 'links to' >> GPL module) through RPCs. 2) Therefore, my business logic is not shipped >> under the 'linked' mode. >> So, I feel this is an OK case for me, i.e., I have not violate the GPL >> license. But I'd like to doubt check with the experience community users. >> Please kindly provide your comments. >> Many thanks,Sean >
