Hi all,
as some of you may already know, one of the keystones of the Defile API is that it's using
JSON schema for many aspects, such as validation of incoming devfiles, building model POJO's and documentation generation.
JSON schema specification itself still doesn't have any releases, and it is
stepping by Internet Draft versions, current of which is Draft-07 [1].
As a result of this, a small variety of java tools supporting JSON schemas,
additionally limited by supported version (some of them still at draft-03, 04 etc.).
Initially, our schema wasn't so complex, and fits into Draft-04, but the more features we add,
(like new complicated tool types such as dockerimage), the more we feel that current tools we use doesn't fit anymore (they're sometimes producing odd validation messages, have some complexity generation collections in POJO) plus we need the latest 07 spec innovations like "if"\"then"\"else" switches e.t.c.
So the another JSON validation tool [2] was found, and firstly things looked pretty nice - latest draft support, active development,
much better UX with messaging, and not least, recommendations from json-schema group.
Also it was require an minimal set of changes in our code, merely, change the used JSON framework from jackson to org.json, which is just another 15 minutes for brave guys like us (ok, maybe half of day) :-)
But when it came to the license checks, the quite interesting things appeared. The author of
json.org api, included the sentence "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" into his software license. [3] It can be interpreted very widely, so at some point, Apache Foundation moved the JSON license to its Category X license list (not approved) [4], so, apparently, we cannot use any library which depends on that API anymore. Surprisingly, eh?
As i found in one of IPZilla CQ-s: "Many many folks have approached Mr. Crockford asking him to revise the license but with no success." Perseverance worthy of respect :-). More details can be found in CQ-s [5], [6].
All-in-all, this is an a major obstacle to further devfile development, and it seems that we will be forced to re-think our approach to all those 3-rd party automatization stuff tools pretty soon.
Regards, Max.
[1]
http://json-schema.org/specification.html[2]
https://github.com/everit-org/json-schema[3]
https://github.com/stleary/JSON-java/blob/master/LICENSE[4]
https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#json [5]
https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13579[6]
https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12764 --
Max Shaposhnyk,
senior software engineer
Red Hat
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