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

[Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY CCDC ARL (USA)]

Florian Weimer wrote on Tuesday, September 24, 2019 6:42 AM 
> * 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.

The ELF idea sounds interesting, but what about other binary containers, e.g. mach-o?  

That said, I for one would find it *highly* amusing if gcc/clang added a switch to embed the complete project into the binary (or even a git bundle, so you can do a pull from an executable).

Thanks,
Cem Karan

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