Webinar: “RDO: An OpenStack community”
May 27, 2013 4:54 pm openstack, red hatWith my colleague Keith Basil, the OpenStackĀ product manager here at Red hat, I will be giving a “webinar” about OpenStack, and Red Hat’s community-driven distribution of it, RDO, this Wednesday at 3pm UTC (5pm CEST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT, other timezones). We will cover what OpenStack is, at a high level, why Red Hat cares about it, and what RDO brings to the table.
Register to attend – I’ll see you there!
May 27th, 2013 at 7:44 pm
One quick question, feel free to point me to a forum post or somewhere if this has been answered before. Red Hat seems to be a great company, and they are very in touch with Free Software. If so, how come they’re releasing their openstack code under an Apache License, instead of something like the GPL, or AGPL, which would protect the code better?
May 27th, 2013 at 8:17 pm
Do you consider that ALv2 software is not free software? I like different licenses for different things – AGPL or GPL v3 for strong copy left, MPL v2 for weak copy left, and Apache for liberally licensed software. Also, Red Hat makes a habit of playing nice with projects. OpenStack is Apache licensed, why would we change it?
May 27th, 2013 at 10:52 pm
RE: comment#2
I’m definitely not a licensing specialist, and even less of a “definition” specialist. I know that Apache v.2 is considered Free Software according to the FSF: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
According to the Redhat Openstack FAQ ( http://www.redhat.com/openstack/FAQ/ ) Redhat is the #2 contributor. I’m sure this fluctuates, but suffice it to say they contribute quite a lot!
I guess, my question, rephrased, is: since they’re investing so much time/money/effort into this project, is it a shame that they’re not using a license that guarantees their code doesn’t become part of a proprietary “cloud” solution?
To be clear, I’m not trying to be a zealot about any of this, it was a real question, because when I learned the above, I was a bit surprised.
To answer your question, I don’t know if Redhat should “change” the license, but since they’re such a big player, I would imagine steering the community into using a *GPL license wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe they could dual-license their code contributions as ALv2/AGPLv3+? The answer to this question is best left to the IP specialists. If I knew all the answers, I wouldn’t have commented to ask my question š
Cheers, and thanks for your time.