LXD 5.20 Released With Canonical Changing It To AGPLv3 Licensing

Following Canonical pulling on control of LXD and maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, LXD 5.20 was released today where they have also decided to change its license moving forward to AGPLv3 by default.

All Canonical contributions to LXD have been relicensed to AGPLv3. Existing community contributions remain under Apache 2.0 but any new constructions going forward will be under AGPLv3 by default.

The re-licensing of the LXD 5.20 code was summed up in today's announcement as:

"Canonical has decided to change the default contributions to the LXD project to AGPLv3 to align with our standard license for server-side code. All Canonical contributions have been relicensed and are now under AGPLv3. Community contributions remain under Apache 2.0. We follow the Software Freedom Law Center guidance in relation to this. Going forward, any contribution to LXD will be made under AGPLv3 by default. The author of a change remains the copyright holder of their code (no copyright assignment).

It is important to note this change does not prevent our users from using, modifying, or providing LXD-based software solutions, provided that they share the source code if they are modifying it and making it available to others. The conditions of the license are designed to encourage those looking to modify the software to contribute back to the project and the community."

LXD 5.20 also raises the minimum Go language requirements, drops various old features, VM support for NVMe storage was imported from Incus, a restructuring of the authorization code, and the VM LXD identifier serial device has been renamed to com.canonical.lxd.

More details on LXD 5.20 can be found via the release announcement.

For those that missed it, following Canonical's LXD changes, Linux Containers forked the project to "Incus".