licensing
There are a few minor licensing nitpicks we should clean up. As background, by far, the codebase was written by @fabled, with the majority of other contributions being @ncopa and myself, I think we have sufficient legal and moral authority to do these things, as well I think they are not really controversial.
Lack of OpenSSL license exception
apk-tools
is licensed as GPL-2.0-only
. This means that even when Alpine switches to OpenSSL 3, this will not be sufficient, as the Apache license imposes additional restrictions (e.g. the software patents stuff) that are not in GPLv2. GPLv3 does add an exception allowing Apache-2 code to link to it, but the GPL-2.0-only
license was chosen intentionally.
We can fix this by adding a license exception grant for OpenSSL. We may want to add a general exception for Apache 2.0 licensed programs as well.
GPL-3.0-only
Makefile-based build system is This will likely be fixed by just removing the old build system once Muon is ready.
libapk
is GPL-2.0-only
It seems like we should relax the license on libapk
to be LGPLv2.1. This would allow programs to link to libapk
such as package management frontends, without worrying about the GPL, which seems ideal for encouraging further adoption of libapk
and APK at large.
@fabled what do you think?