[rabbitmq-discuss] Freely licensed specs

Wed Apr 24 16:40:08 BST 2013

On 24/04/13 16:16, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Hi,

Hi.

> I am a Debian developer, and as you may know Debian is pretty strict on
> licensing issues.

We're very aware of that! And we have tried to be careful around 
licensing issues.

> Some AMQP-related tools and libraries require the AMQP specs available
> at build- or runtime.  For plain AMQP there are BSD-licensed "stripped"
> specs available, but it seems your derived specs are available only
> licensed with the Debian-incompatible AMQP license :-(

That's not entirely true; the extended spec which the RabbitMQ server 
and official (and many unofficial) clients actually use:

http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen/file/bbf467c98a21/amqp-rabbitmq-0.9.1.json

is BSD-licensed.

However, I notice that the extended spec available from 
http://www.rabbitmq.com/protocol.html is only available in an 
AMQP-licensed version. Was that what you were talking about?

Anyway, we should correct that...

> This issue is pretty serious, it seems: Some existing AMQP-related
> Debian packages are at risk of being removed from Debian if this is not
> solved.

...but to know how high a priority to give producing such a spec I would 
need to know if any packages in Debian are currently using the 
AMQP-licensed extended XML spec. Can you tell me which packages these 
are? I can't get anything useful out of bugs.debian.org :-(

Cheers, Simon

-- 
Simon MacMullen
RabbitMQ, VMware