On Wed, 2012-02-01 at 10:54 +0530, Prashant Shewale wrote:
I would like to ask if we can use RHQ framework as base for
commercial project. I would like to design management software for our
enterprise software using RHQ as a base. I know RHQ is licensed as GPL
and so its difficult to sell closed source product. Can you please
provide me some guidelines?
I would guess that virtually all, if not all, of the people on this list
are not lawyers, including me. Therefore, any advice you get here, I
would not pay attention too :) ESPECIALLY if you plan on marketing a
commercial project, I wouldn't rely on the accuracy of the opinions you
might get here.
I can give you the following facts, however. In general, the RHQ Server
is GPL licensed, the core RHQ Agent wrapper (e.g. AgentMain.java) is GPL
licensed but the internal, pluggable plugin container (and all of its
internals and the plugins themselves) are LGPL licensed.
The plugin container and plugins are licensed with LGPL to allow
commercial or third party offerings to embed the management agent
functionality (which we call the plugin container) in other Java
application runtimes to perform management/monitoring functionality for
you. We did this, for example, for the old JBossAS 5 management web
console (called Embedded Jopr) - and JBossAS 5 is LGPL (which is one
reason why we gave the plugin container the same license).
You are free to run write your own plugins, obviously, and plug them
into an out-of-box RHQ environment. That's clear. You are also free to
embedd the plugin container itself into your own Java application (due
to the LGPL license) such as was already done in another LGPL project:
JBossAS 5.
If you need more specific information, we'd have to have our lawyers
talk to your lawyers :)
John "IANAL" Mazz