openstack/governance
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governance/reference/licensing.rst
Doug Hellmann a5838e9785 improve licensing docs 
Clarify some wording and add links to things that may need to be defined
for readers.

Change-Id: I98d0fc82ab9e66001e287dd2e21a1ba626823d17
2016-01-26 15:41:13 -05:00

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Licensing requirements

Official OpenStack projects need to follow a number of rules when it comes to licensing.

In order to be considered for inclusion in the tag-tc-approved-release, the project must be licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ASLv2).

OpenStack projects and libraries produced under the Big Tent should generally be licensed under ASLv2, and otherwise must be licensed under a license supported by the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which allows redistribution by the OpenStack Foundation under ASLv2 (currently only the MIT and both forms of the BSD license meet this requirement). In particular, service projects are recommended to always pick ASLv2 so that they may be included in the TC-approved release in the future.

In order to be acceptable as dependencies of OpenStack projects, external libraries (produced and published by 3rd-party developers) must be licensed under an OSI-approved license that does not restrict distribution of the consuming project. The list of acceptable licenses includes ASLv2, BSD (both forms), MIT, PSF, LGPL, ISC, and MPL. Licenses considered incompatible with this requirement include GPLv2, GPLv3, and AGPL.

Projects run as part of the OpenStack Infrastructure (in order to produce OpenStack software) may be licensed under any OSI-approved license.

Other licenses (not explicitly listed in this document) may be considered in the future on a case-by-case basis by the Technical Committee, with the help of the OpenStack Foundation legal counsel.