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LXD now re-licensed and below a CLA

LXD now re-licensed and below a CLA

2023-12-12 15:18:08

The info

As of earlier right now, proper earlier than the discharge of LXD 5.20, Canonical made a few adjustments to LXD that are positive to have a severe influence to LXD customers and downstream tasks that combine with LXD or present options primarily based on it.

The primary is the re-licensing of LXD from the Apache2 license to the AGPLv3 license.
This occurred in: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12663

The second is the addition of the Canonical CLA as requirement for all additional contributions.
This occurred in: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12665https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12663

Disclaimer

What’s beneath is my private evaluation of the scenario, it’s not authorized recommendation, anybody affected could be very strongly inspired to hunt correct authorized recommendation from their counsel.

Actual license of LXD

Per the commit message performing the re-licensing, all additional contributions can be below the AGPLv3 license and all contributions from Canonical staff have been re-licensed to AGPLv3.

Nonetheless, Canonical doesn’t personal the copyright on any contribution from non-employees, akin to the various adjustments they’ve imported from Incus over the previous few months. These subsequently stay below the Apache2 license that they had been contributed below.

Because of this, Canonical can’t launch LXD below the AGPLv3 license and certain by no means will have the ability to.
LXD is now below a bizarre mixture of Apache2 and AGPLv3 with no clear metadata indicating what file or what a part of every file is below one license or the opposite.

That is prone to make it very “enjoyable” for anybody performing licensing critiques to judge LXD for adoption of their atmosphere.

Impression to LXD customers

For LXD customers, aside from probably triggering company insurance policies that ban the usage of AGPLv3 software program (extra widespread than one might imagine), the influence must be minimal. It’s nonetheless the identical LXD and it’s nonetheless open supply software program.

Nonetheless, should you had been altering LXD in any method, then you’ll need to familiarize your self with the AGPLv3 license as not like Apache2, it does require any adjustments be made accessible below the AGPLv3 even should you don’t expose your customers to your modified binaries. That is the primary design traits of the AGPLv3 license, it was meant to power these working modified variations of open supply as a hosted service to share their modifications.

Impression to downstreams (client of LXD Go packages)

Up till now, all of the Go packages of LXD had been below the Apache2 license, that was becoming fairly nicely within the Go ecosystem the place the Apache2, BSDs and MIT licenses are extremely popular.

Now with this variation, you’ll want to understand that you could be begin to embrace/bundle AGPLv3 code inside your individual venture. This a copyleft license and so could require re-licensing of your individual venture to adjust to it.

Once more, that is fairly the can of worms, with my standard advice being “keep away”, however should you should use any of LXD’s Go packages, I’d strongly suggest speaking to a lawyer to totally perceive your publicity to that new license.

Impression on Incus

Now for what clearly impacts me essentially the most, what that is going to do to Incus.

As a quick reminder Incus is a fork of LXD which was began in August 2023.
Up to now, it’s been monitoring LXD adjustments, making use of those who make sense and in any other case fixing bugs and making enhancements of its personal, as most forks do.

This modification from Canonical goes to be inflicting two unlucky unwanted effects:

  • Incus will now not be together with adjustments originating from LXD as that might require us to incorporate AGPLv3 code into our codebase and so get us into the identical blended license mess as LXD now put itself. That is clearly unacceptable to us, we very very similar to licensing readability and fairly benefit from the Apache2 license.
  • LXD will equally now not have the ability to take adjustments from Incus, as these are going to stay below the Apache2 license and extra importantly, is not going to have been launched below the Canonical CLA.

To implement that second half, the tooling we’ve been utilizing to this point to observe LXD adjustments and mechanically backport them to Incus can be used to detect any adjustments to LXD which originated from Incus. Until the creator gave categorical consent for them to be launched below a distinct license and below the Canonical CLA, these adjustments shouldn’t be included in LXD.

Incus can be a client of the LXD Go API within the lxd-to-incus software. Fortunately, we’ve no want for something current in there, so will merely be ensuring that we by no means import code previous the licensing change.

See Also

Conclusion

General, I’m very disillusioned, though completely not stunned in seeing this variation occur.
It’s actually going to be fairly annoying for Incus, and I think that is the entire level of it.

But it surely’s additionally a really odd transfer by Canonical because it places LXD right into a problematic gray space so far as its true license is anxious which is able to seemingly critically damage its adoption each by firms and distributions.

In any case, I’d urge anybody who has issues about this variation to achieve out to their authorized illustration and possibly think about switching over to Incus the place we’ll fortunately preserve releasing our CLA-free Apache2 licensed fork of this as soon as nice venture.

Replace #1

I’ve seen a lot of folks level out that Apache2 is appropriate with the AGPLv3 and that’s actually right, nevertheless compatibility doesn’t imply that the code in query immediately turns into AGPLv3, it implies that it may be included in an AGPLv3 venture. So I’d nonetheless anticipate there to be good monitoring of the license of the person information / code chunks so that somebody can inform whether or not a selected piece of code is AGPLv3 or Apache2, that is presently not attainable.

The code mentions headers (in all probability SPDX) to be current every time code isn’t AGPLv3, however no such headers had been launched at time of writing.

The announcement additionally very particularly spells out that previous contributions usually are not being re-licensed and subsequently stay below the Apache2 license, although once more, there may be presently no method to determine what contributions that’s. So this nonetheless results in LXD now being a mixture of AGPLv3 and Apache2 with no method to determine which is which.

All that’s identified for positive is that every one new contributions are to be below AGPLv3 and should be from copyright holders (creator or employer) who has signed the Canonical CLA. These two will preclude the inclusion of any Incus code in LXD shifting ahead.

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