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LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

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Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#11

Post by jraph »

Is this FUD? [edit: it's not, see the replies - I kept my original comment below because that's what people answered to, but I no longer agree with it]

---

The linked announcement says

> Going forward, any contribution to LXD will be made under AGPLv3 by default. The author of a change remains the copyright holder of their code (no copyright assignment).

Emphasis mine. No copyright assignment.

So, Canonical now contributes in AGPLv3. The project is now AGPLv3 as well, with some parts in Apache 2. Contributors may contribute in Apache 2 if they wish but probably won't bother. They still own their code.

The author is pissed off because he can't build custom versions without redistributing the modifications and can't sell services to companies afraid of the AGPL anymore.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#12

Post by shp0ngle »

"As a result, Canonical cannot release LXD under the AGPLv3 license and likely never will be able to. LXD is now under a weird mix of Apache2 and AGPLv3 with no clear metadata indicating what file or what part of each file is under one license or the other."

IANAL but that's not true? You can take Apache2 and relicense it under AGPL? You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft".

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2

It's entirely kosher in my opinion, and the entire thing agpl, with no "weird mix" or whatever

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#13

Post by [deleted] »

tecleandor wrote: post #8
headhasthoughts wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, too, are wrong. From Canonical's actual announcement: > Canonical has decided to change the default contributions to the LXD project to AGPLv3 to align with our standard license for server-side code. All Canonical contributions have been relicensed and are now under AGPLv3. Community contributions remain under Apache 2.0.

You're both kinda correct. What Stephane was complaining about is the whole Snap package for lxd has been marked as AGPL, and that's not correct. Check in the store, down, in the license info section: https://snapcraft.io/lxd Edit: also, from what I see in the commit, it doesn't make much distinction between what's AGPL and what not. https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12663/commits/b8ff449d...

[deleted]

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#14

Post by ropyeett »

jraph wrote: post #11

Is this FUD? [edit: it's not, see the replies - I kept my original comment below because that's what people answered to, but I no longer agree with it] --- The linked announcement says > Going forward, any contribution to LXD will be made under AGPLv3 by default. The author of a change remains the copyright holder of their code (no copyright assignment). Emphasis mine. No copyright assignment. So, Canonical now contr…

https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors/agreement for the details.

In short, you don't lose your own copyright but you grant them a license to do whatever they want including re-license as they wish without having to ever consult you, allowing for your code to be used within their closed source projects under any license they wish.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#15

Post by ropyeett »

shp0ngle wrote: post #12

"As a result, Canonical cannot release LXD under the AGPLv3 license and likely never will be able to. LXD is now under a weird mix of Apache2 and AGPLv3 with no clear metadata indicating what file or what part of each file is under one license or the other." IANAL but that's not true? You can take Apache2 and relicense it under AGPL? You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft". https://www.gnu.or…

They can freely include Apache2 licensed code in an AGPLv3 project without having to re-license the entire project under Apache2 as it's not a copyleft license. However this doesn't make the code they included AGPLv3, that code remains Apache2 and must be declared as such.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#16

Post by jraph »

shp0ngle wrote: post #12

"As a result, Canonical cannot release LXD under the AGPLv3 license and likely never will be able to. LXD is now under a weird mix of Apache2 and AGPLv3 with no clear metadata indicating what file or what part of each file is under one license or the other." IANAL but that's not true? You can take Apache2 and relicense it under AGPL? You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft". https://www.gnu.or…

> You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft".

Only if licenses are compatible. But Apache 2 is AGPL-compatible so

> It's entirely kosher in my opinion

Yes, I think so too.

However, they need to make it clear which parts are under Apache 2.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#17

Post by shp0ngle »

shp0ngle wrote: post #12

"As a result, Canonical cannot release LXD under the AGPLv3 license and likely never will be able to. LXD is now under a weird mix of Apache2 and AGPLv3 with no clear metadata indicating what file or what part of each file is under one license or the other." IANAL but that's not true? You can take Apache2 and relicense it under AGPL? You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft". https://www.gnu.or…

what IS weird though is the go exosystem thing.

in go ecosystem, copyleft is very much not the norm.

People might not realise that by just adding copyleft dependency to go.mod, the entire project becomes effectively agpl as it has the code built-in.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#18

Post by jraph »

ropyeett wrote: post #14
jraph wrote: post #11

Is this FUD? [edit: it's not, see the replies - I kept my original comment below because that's what people answered to, but I no longer agree with it] --- The linked announcement says > Going forward, any contribution to LXD will be made under AGPLv3 by default. The author of a change remains the copyright holder of their code (no copyright assignment). Emphasis mine. No copyright assignment. So, Canonical now contr…

https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors/agreement for the details. In short, you don't lose your own copyright but you grant them a license to do whatever they want including re-license as they wish without having to ever consult you, allowing for your code to be used within their closed source projects under any license they wish.

Ah, right, it's not a copyright assignment, but there is a CLA. Confused the two concepts, rookie mistake. So yeah, not good. I will edit my comment. I would even say that not mentioning the CLA and mentioning the absence of copyright assignment in the announcement is quite dishonest.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#19

Post by jorams »

shp0ngle wrote: post #17
shp0ngle wrote: post #12

"As a result, Canonical cannot release LXD under the AGPLv3 license and likely never will be able to. LXD is now under a weird mix of Apache2 and AGPLv3 with no clear metadata indicating what file or what part of each file is under one license or the other." IANAL but that's not true? You can take Apache2 and relicense it under AGPL? You can take "less copyleft" license and make it "more copyleft". https://www.gnu.or…

what IS weird though is the go exosystem thing. in go ecosystem, copyleft is very much not the norm. People might not realise that by just adding copyleft dependency to go.mod, the entire project becomes effectively agpl as it has the code built-in.

If you add a dependency without understanding the license that dependency is released under, you should stop doing that. That counts for every license, and particularly if there is no license.

Re: LXD now re-licensed and under a CLA

#20

Post by xoa »

jraph wrote: post #11

Is this FUD? [edit: it's not, see the replies - I kept my original comment below because that's what people answered to, but I no longer agree with it] --- The linked announcement says > Going forward, any contribution to LXD will be made under AGPLv3 by default. The author of a change remains the copyright holder of their code (no copyright assignment). Emphasis mine. No copyright assignment. So, Canonical now contr…

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the post also links the "add Canonical CLA check #12665" [0], and my understanding is that "retain copyright" here is like a typical forum agreement where you going forward must agree to a perpetual worldwide unlimited license to Canonical that they can use as they please per [1]:

>In effect, you’re giving us a licence, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your code and use it in other projects.

You explicitly do retain ownership, so you can then take that same code and contribute it elsewhere under any license you wish. The same author could contribute the same patch to both the LXD and the Incus fork. But some might object to being required to allow Canonical to specially license as they want.

So your characterization seems unfair, and then gets kind of nasty at the end:

>The author is pissed off because he can't build custom versions without redistributing the modifications

Incus is a full fork, and Canonical has apparently been taking changes back from it as well as is often the case with such forks where both sides get value from each other. It's perfectly understandable for some folks to be bummed if that's no longer the case, and there is nothing evil about the Apache2 license. There's plenty of history that in OSS going back to the beginning, no need for insinuations or attacks. Shouldn't throw around "FUD" at core authors just because they're a touch blindsided.

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0: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12665/commits/eb5c773d...

1: https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors

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