Licensing problem with HCL support #2563
Description
Happy New Year, and congratulations on adding HCL support to YQ!
Unfortunately this is creating a licensing issue for the Lima project:
The hashicorp/hcl module is under the MPL license, which is generally not approved for CNCF projects. Fortunately there is a licensing exception for this specific module from 2019.
However, since then the hashicorp/hcl module has added a dependency on apparentlymart/go-textseg, which comes with a custom license. The licensing terms seem fine to me, but CNCF projects are only allowed to depend on other software using specific approved licenses.
Which means the Lima project can no longer use the latest versions of yqlib once it has an unconditional dependency on hashicorp/hcl. 😞
I'm wondering if you would be willing to add a build tag to the files implementing HCL functionality, with alternate files providing just stubs when compiled without the HCL support tag?
That way yq itself could be build with e.g. the hcl tag and include HCL support, but other projects using yqlib would not add hashicorp/hcl and further indirect dependencies to their go.mod files? Let me know if you want me to propose a PR to implement something like this?
An alternative for us could be to maintain a fork that removes HCL support, but that would require ongoing maintenance, which I would prefer to avoid.