Hi guys, I've just committed our NOTICE files and the licenses of the libraries we depend on. For everybody to be on the same page, the policy regarding third-party dependencies at the ASF is roughly (at least for now):
- ASL, MIT, BSD are okay. - CDDL, CPL, EPL, MPL are sort of okay but to be used with care (additional warnings). Avoiding them altogether would be nice, especially given that we don't depend on any of these ATM. We're in a gray area here (the main difficult point being that you *always* distribute sources in Ruby). - GPL, LGPL, BCL, Sleepycat and a few others are definitely not okay. As you may have noticed the Ruby license is not in the list. I've asked some feedback on it but I don't anticipate big problems there, the Ruby license itself (obviously we wouldn't choose the GPL) is fairly liberal even if it has a few quirks. So provided that the Ruby License is fine, all our dependencies are kosher except Antwrap (LGPL). We'll see what we can do there. >From now on please keep the following in mind: 1. If you plan to add a hard dependency (not an optional feature) on something and it's not licensed under ASL, MIT or BSD, please ask here first. 2. For all other open source projects you're involved in, think twice before choosing a license and make the license choice and the copyright clear. Please. For the sanity of those who will use your stuff. Cheers! Matthieu
