I totally agree that a lot of people would be fine with using a GPL deployment 
tool, but we need to be pretty careful about IP in our company, and it is not 
at all cool that the true license is not stated up front so people can make a 
decision about it.  

I do feel that since Jamis Buck and co did so much great work on an MIT 
project, it doesn't feel right to effectively GPL the new version of it, or at 
least a very major part of it, without public discussion.  GPL is really not 
very friendly to the Ruby community, which has been deliberately very liberal 
with its licenses so we don't have to deal with this crap.

With regards to the maintainers, I don't have any beef with leehambley who I'm 
sure has done a lot of good work there.  But it is his company lawyers who have 
imposed the license and I have zero trust in them, especially since a) they 
don't appear to understand the GPL as I read it and b) they have declared:

> SSHKit is intentionally restrictively licensed to protect the investment that 
> my company made in building it, which is something I also don't have a choice 
> about


Our lawyers can't just ignore that.

In addition, I'll have to check with legal, but my understanding was that the 
GPL can be enforced by anyone - not just the copyright owners.  So to a certain 
extent it doesn't matter what leehambley's lawyers' interpretation is, it's 
what the world's is, and the rest of the world interprets GPL in the 
traditional way.

Rsync is a bit easier because it's a separate program and the interface between 
it and callers is very minimal, so basically not enough to create a combined 
work unless your whole product is somehow based around rsync and closely 
integrated with it.  Now in fact we've been advised that there is no clear rule 
as to what makes something a combined work, but using a library directly and 
basing your tools around it certainly does make it a combined work - that is 
indeed the point of the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL) for libraries.

Does that affect deployment if your deployment is integrated somehow with your 
application?  No probably not, but I'm not likely to be able to convince our 
general counsel that we should be the ones to find out :).


On 8/02/2014, at 09:08 , Steve H <[email protected]> wrote:

> If you're concerned, simply don't bundle capistrano with your application; 
> use it independently. Your capistrano deploy scripts don't even need to be in 
> the same repository, let alone the Gemfile.
> 
> To add to what Grant said: rsync is GPL; if you used rsync to deploy your 
> application, it doesn't mean your application now must be licensed under the 
> GPL.
> 
> Also, unless I'm missing something, leehambley is also the author of sshkit, 
> and came right out and said you specifically are fine to use it. So what are 
> you concerned about? Him reneging and suing?
> 
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