How to win the copyleft fight—without litigation (Opensource.com)

Posted Jul 15, 2015 18:11 UTC (Wed) by jhhaller (guest, #56103)
Parent article: How to win the copyleft fight—without litigation (Opensource.com)

It's interesting that even FOSS products don't necessarily make complying with other FOSS licenses easily. OpenStack Ceilometer, a metrics collection component, can use MongoDB as one of its storage backends. MongoDB is AGPL, so building an OpenStack cloud based on MongoDB requires making the source for MongoDB available through the cloud's user interface. But, there is no link in the OpenStack Horizon GUI which would enable this. Installing a cloud, such as RDO, doesn't even download the MongoDB source package, even though MongoDB is the default Ceilometer storage backend.

How to win the copyleft fight—without litigation (Opensource.com)

Posted Jul 21, 2015 10:25 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

>MongoDB is AGPL, so building an OpenStack cloud based on MongoDB requires making the source for MongoDB available through the cloud's user interface

I'm not a licensing expert, but I don't think so:

>if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge

So if you've not modified MongoDB, then you wouldn't have any obligation to add the link. I imagine some people would argue that the entire stack built on it would be considered a derivative work and therefore should be AGPL, but I think that would be a hard sell for a pluggable storage backend.