Hello all,
Recently there was a discussion and a vote among the Core
Developer Community about licencing of module_utils and it was decided
to change the guideline[0]. There is a pull request with the changes
to the Developer Docs[1] open, but the new Guideline is as follows:
All modules shipped with Ansible must be done so under the GPLv3
license. Files under the lib/ansible/module_utils/ directory should be
done so under the BSD license. However, some exceptions exist.
``module_utils`` that are for a small set of modules for a specific
vendor's hardware, provider, or service are allowed to be under GPLv3+
instead of BSD Licensing. module_utils that are generic in nature
(could be used with modules from more than one vendor or project) must
be BSD as this allows third party and Galaxy modules to utilize the
libraries without dictating their license. If there's doubt as to
which category a module_util falls into, the Ansible Core Team will
decide during an Ansible Core Community Meeting.
If there are any past attempts to merge GPLv3 code into module_utils
that authors feel meet the criteria of the new Guidelines, please feel
free to re-open pull requests or add it to the agenda for the next
Core Community Meeting[2].
Thank you,
-AdamM
[0] - https://github.com/ansible/community/issues/329#issuecomment-413005278
[1] - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44144
[2] - https://github.com/ansible/community/issues/329