Only few people may have recognized that June 21st 2015 was a big day for the Camel-Extra community. Besides the fact that this day in June marks the first release of Camel-Extra that supports ASF Camel 2.14.x, it is the release where we opened up the license support to the most open OSS license that is applicable for the underlying component.
Finding the appropriate software license is always difficult for an open source project. This statement is even more valid if you start building off existing components where each has its own license model. Since Camel-Extra extends the enterprise integration project ASF Camel with components that can not be hosted within the Apache infrastructure, it is built into its DNA to deal with third-party libraries. The reason why Camel-Extra components can not be hosted within the Apache infrastructure is related to license compatibility issues between the Apache License and the third-party OSS licenses.
Courageous Camel riders have therefore built an environment within Apache-Extras, to provide an environment where the development and community support for these components is possible. In order to simplify the build structure and reduce the amount of headache with new components, the initial attempt was to base Camel-Extra upon the GNU General Public License. However, this approach lead to several discussions within the community, since the GPL License is not very friendly for commercial adoption. As a consequence, we’ve decided to approach a multi-license support strategy, which allows us to open the software license for components that are not dependent upon GPL libraries. On the other hand, those components that have still dependencies to GPL libraries still reside under its respective parent license.
The following list will help to understand the current license assignments. Please note that these assignments may change over time, in case the underlying library adjust their license model.
GPL License | LGPL License |
---|---|
camel-db4o | camel-couchbase |
camel-esper | camel-exist |
camel-spring-neo4j | camel-hibernate |
camel-vtdxml | camel-jboss |
camel-jboss6 | |
camel-jcifs | |
camel-rcode | |
camel-virtualbox | |
camel-zeromq |
I hope you all enjoy the new license approach and many of you will be able to adopt components within your projects. Please remember that we love contributions. Anything you share with the community (i.e.filing bugs, contributing code, helping with documentation) will help to maintain the project better!