Varying Vagrant Vagrants Adopts Open Source MIT License

photo credit: opensource.com

Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.2.0 was released last week after nine months in development. As of VVV 1.2.0, new instances of VVV will have the database entirely contained inside the virtual machine, as opposed to previous versions where it was mapped to a persistent local location.

VVV project leader Jeremy Felt recommends a full vagrant destroy and the removal of MySQL data from {vvv-dir}/database/data/ in order to keep a clean workflow in the future. “If database files already exist from an earlier version of VVV, data will continue to be mapped locally until removed,” he said, explaining the backward compatibility included in the release. “Anybody currently running VVV 1.1 may not even notice the change.”

One of the most important updates in VVV 1.2 is the addition of a license. The project has adopted the open source MIT license after a six-month long discussion with participation from more than 50 contributors on the project.

“This is a big deal and we waited entirely too long as an open source project before choosing one,” Felt said. “In fact, you could say we weren’t really an open source project at all until that point. If there’s any lesson I learned from this, it’s to start with a license before anything else.”

Ultimately, the project went with the more permissive MIT license over the GPL for a number of practical reasons. Since the MIT license is GPL-compatible, anyone who forks VVV can distribute a fork as GPL-licensed, if desired. It also allows for more contributions back to the project from representatives of corporations or government entities that are not as GPL-friendly.

For more details on the technical improvements included in VVV 1.2.0, check out the full changelog for the release.