[License-discuss] Discussion: AGPL and Open Source Definition conflict

[Florian Weimer]

* Howard Chu:

> That sounds like a fair summary, yes. Also, simply adding a
> non-standard extension to our server to meet this license
> requirement doesn't solve anything, if all LDAP clients aren't also
> modified to recognize the extension, and that in particular seems an
> unrealistic task.

For LDAPS, you could use ALPN (RFC 7301) and offer source code
download over regular HTTPS, on the same port.  But that only works
for AGPL compliance of the LDAP server itself.  It does not solve the
problem of storage plugins with AGPL compliance requirements.

One could come up with a mechanism which bundles source code into ELF
sections, and then use the dynamic loader to enumerate all loaded ELF
objects and extract the sources for them, so that compliance could be
automatic even in that case (as long as there is a protocol-specific
adaption which allows for tunneling or otherwise providing source code
access).  But such a mechanism does not exist today, and it directly
conflicts with goals such as minimizing the size of container images
(which have source availability problems of their own, of course).  If
the source code is not bundled directly in the ELF file, obtaining it
as required to serve a source retrieval request becomes much more
complicated.