[DISCUSS] Prohibited licensed items in CloudStack

[David Nalley <da...@gnsa.us>]

Another OSCON discussion.
We discussed this particular issue, with a special focus on
libvirt-java. I think the advice could be applied to other libraries
with prohibited licensing. The real constriction seems to be on the
release - which is a source release. Convenience binaries are not
'official releases' and thus appear to have different guidelines.

What we know - we can't ship libvirt-java in our release because of
the license, and it needs to disappear from our repo.

Some of our potential options:
We could make KVM support a non-default build option. We could
potentially distribute libvirt-java (provided we get approval from
legal@) in a convenience tarball of dependencies, and we could
potentially create convenience binaries built with that dependency
(though we may or may not get permission to distribute libvirt-java in
that binary, but could of course rely on it being present)

So theoretically we could do this for other libraries as well (we even
discussed the VMware SDK) though I think we should be judicious in
determining if there are suitable alternatives, because each of these
issues we need to seek approval for from legal@, and we should ensure
that it really is needed, and not merely a temporary convenience.

--David