Question about txzookeeper license

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Alexandre Parenteau's message of Sun Dec 11 01:43:20 -0800 2011:
> Hi,
> 

Hello and welcome!

> My question relates to txzookeeper only, but I could not find a
> specific mailing list, please let me know if there is a more
> appropriate place to ask the question.
> 
> In my company, I'd like to suggest to use txzookeeper for a
> proprietary project, however I'm unsure of what is the license for it.
> 
> - Launchpad lists the project as being GNU LGPL v3.
> - Pypi lists it as both LGPL (no version) and MIT license
> - The code itself has license files for both GNU GPL v3, and GNU LGPL v3
> 

If you read COPYING.LESSER, it modifies COPYING to allow linking. This
is the standard way of distributing the LGPL. Pypi is wrong, and should
be fixed... not sure who controls the pypi distribution channel.. Kapil?

To be clear, every file in the source tree explicitly references LGPLv3
or later, except mocker.py which is used in the test suite only and is
included under a BSD license.

> As a subsidiary question, is there a thinking of where will
> txzookeeper be maintained, whether it will find its place eventually
> in Apache's zookeeper source tree for example, or will it stay on
> Launchpad.
> 

txzookeeper will definitely be maintained on Launchpad for the forseeable
future. I don't know that it would really be best served inside ZK's
source tree, and its LGPLv3 license might even give pause to the ASF,
I don't know how they feel about non apache licensed code in ASF projects.

> To set the context, my company already uses Apache projects, and from
> time to time we have been submitting patches and projects with ASF
> License. However our legal department will probably have similar
> questions regarding txzookeeper in order to approve its usage
> internally.
> 

The LGPL license of txzookeeper isn't going anywhere, so if you guys
would like to contribute, you'll probably need to get approval for
contributing under the LGPLv3 license. You'll also want to have your
legal folks read this:

http://www.canonical.com/contributors

As txzookeeper is maintained by Canonical it would likely require signing
of the CLA (its not that big of a deal anymore, you keep your copyrights,
you just give Canonical a license to re-license your work.)