[ovs-dev] InMon sFlow licence and DFSG

[Simon Horman]

On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 01:43:55PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 06:25:43AM +0900, Simon Horman wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 10:11:22AM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > > On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 09:44:48AM +0900, Simon Horman wrote:
> > > > I noticed the following clause in the COPYING file and I am wondering
> > > > about the compatibility of this licence with the DFSG.
> > > > 
> > > > Files lib/sflow*.[ch] are licensed under the terms of the InMon sFlow
> > > > licence that is available at:
> > > >         http://www.inmon.com/technology/sflowlicense.txt
> > > 
> > > I'm not sure.  We could (probably should) bring it up on debian-legal.
> > 
> > Ok, good plan. Would you like me to do that?
> 
> Yes, please do so if you have time.
> 
> > > Peter Phaal from InMon wrote to me privately to mention that the same
> > > code is also available under the Adaptive Public License at
> > >         http://host-sflow.sourceforge.net/license.html
> > > The APL is OSI-certified but I don't see anything in Debian with that
> > > license, so I'm unsure whether it's DFSG-free also.
> > 
> > Do you know specifically which code and are you able to disclose that?
> 
> I don't see anything truly private in the email that Peter sent me.  I
> was only paraphrasing it out of courtesy, not out of any need to hold
> back private information.  Here is the interesting part of the body:
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Neil pointed out the question about the sFlow license on the ovs-dev mailing
> list:
> http://openvswitch.org/pipermail/dev_openvswitch.org/2010-November/004020.html
> 
> I took a look at the DFSG terms:
> http://www.debian.org/social_contract
> 
> I don't see any incompatibility between the sFlow license and the Debian
> Free Software Guidelines. However, since the sFlow license isn't an
> officially recognized open source license it might be simpler for the
> OVS project to use the same dual licensing scheme that we are using for
> the Host sFlow project:
> http://host-sflow.sourceforge.net/participate.php
> 
> The Adaptive Public License (APL) is an approved open source license:
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/apl1.0.php
> 
> You can use the following link to reference the APL license for sFlow:
> http://host-sflow.sourceforge.net/license.html
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I assume that Peter meant that the entire tarball for the download link
> at http://sourceforge.net/projects/host-sflow/ is available under the
> Adaptive Public License.  However, that tarball has conflicting
> information--the top-level LICENSE says that it is licensed under the
> APL, but src/sflow/README and src/sflow/*.c (the files that OVS needs)
> say that they are licensed under the InMon sFlow license.  So, if the
> InMon sFlow license is not acceptable to Debian, but the APL is, then we
> would need to get that clarified.

I would prefer to clarify that that go through debian-legal.

Incidently, openvswitch was accepted into Debian overnight (my time).
It should appear in the Debian archive in the unstable distribution
within the next 24 hours :-)