[rabbitmq-discuss] Freely licensed specs

Wed Apr 24 18:27:08 BST 2013

Quoting Simon MacMullen (2013-04-24 17:40:08)
> On 24/04/13 16:16, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > 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.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that any of _your_ tools or libraries are 
non-free licensed - only the spec files you publish.

> > 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.

Ah, so it exists, just well hidden.

> 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...

Yes, please do provide your specs (also the earlier 0-8 one) as XML.

As I wrote in my P.S. I believe to have those specs prepared for you 
already - just needs proof-reading and formal hand-over (from your side 
only: I need no credit, but your license doesn't allow my editing so you 
need to permit me that explicitly, I believe).

> > 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 :-(

Now that I inspected more closely it turns out that only a single 
package - qpid-python - is in violation - and then not your derived 
specs but original ones.

I now filed [bug#706101] - after you posted above, so no wonder you 
couldn't find it - if you tried :-).

Even if not so serious after all, still relevant for my needs: The Perl 
module [AnyEvent::RabbitMQ] ships with your published XML.  I will get 
in touch with the author and suggest using your JSON instead...

Thanks for your swift reply,

 - Jonas

[bug#706101]: http://bugs.debian.org/706101

[AnyEvent::RabbitMQ]: https://metacpan.org/module/AnyEvent::RabbitMQ

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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