Dear ASF Legal Affairs Committee, The Apache Spark development community has begun some discussions <http://apache-spark-developers-list.1001551.n3.nabble.com/Publishing-official-docker-images-for-KubernetesSchedulerBackend-td22928.html> about publishing container images for Spark as part of its release process. These discussions were spurred by the upstream adoption of a new Kubernetes scheduling back-end, which by nature operates via container images running Spark inside a Kubernetes cluster.
The current state of thinking on this topic is influenced by the LEGAL-270 Jira <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-270> which can be summarized as: * A container image has the same legal status as other derived distributions * As such, it is legally sound to publish a container image as long as that image corresponds to an official project release * An image that is regularly built from non-release code (e.g. a 'spark:latest' image built from the head of master branch) would not be legally approved * The image should not contain any code or binaries that carry GPL licenses, or other licenses considered incompatible with ASF. We are reaching out to you to get your additional input on what requirements the community should meet to engineer Apache Spark container images that meet ASF legal guidelines. The original dev@spark thread is here: http://apache-spark-developers-list.1001551.n3.nabble.com/Publishing-official-docker-images-for-KubernetesSchedulerBackend-td22928.html LEGAL-270: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-270
