Licencing - LGPL

What?

Flying Circus and its code is made available under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public Licence), version 3. This is a copy-left open source licence intended for libraries that are used by other projects, regardless of the licencing that project uses.

The expectation is that if you modify Flying Circus itself (eg. fix a bug in the core components, or update the mappings to Amazon Web Services) then you will make those improvements available to the broader community, ideally via a Pull Request on GitHub. When you use Flying Circus to define your AWS infrastructure as a separate project or Python module, then that Python code and any generated artefacts (like Cloud Formation YAML) remains your own, which you can do with as you please.

Why?

The open source community nowadays is a fantastic example of something that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. So much modern software is built on the shoulders of giants - our predecessors and peers who have created powerful software for us to use. But there will always be selfish people who take advantage of everyone else, and don’t want to give back to the community.

A GPL-style licence provides a degree of legal protection to force bad actors to do the right thing, whilst not inconveniencing the rest of us. The LGPL variant, in particular, allows users to retain IP ownership and confidentiality for their internal infrastructure, whilst still gaining the power of Flying Circus.

Thanks for reading. We sincerely hope that Flying Circus helps you, and look forward to hearing from you in our community.

Third Party

Flying Circus functionality is implemented using 3rd party libraries that have their own licences. It is your responsibility to check that these licences are acceptable to you.

Flying Circus is used in conjunction with Amazon Web Services, as a tool for using the AWS CloudFormation API. As such, Flying Circus is partially dependent on the AWS CloudFormation Template Resource specification . The current version of the specification referenced by Flying Circus can be found in the contrib/ directory in the project’s source code.