Frequently Asked Questions

Why Seedwing?

A seedwing is used by the seeds of plants such as maple trees to help disperse their seeds and help them safely reach the ground so that they can grow up to be successful trees.

It seemed appropriate.

Who is behind the project?

The project was conceived at Red Hat. It is open-source and contributions are always welcomed.

What is the license?

All components of Seedwing are licensed under the Apache License version 2.

Why is the language called Dogma?

Policy, in general, tends to be dogmatic. What one person likes may not match what another person likes. Plus, it gave us the opportunity to use the .dog filename extension, and we love dogs.

If you love dogs, it’s suggested you check out Potcake Place as a lovely place to acquire a dog in need or simply donate to their mission.

Here’s one potcake member of the team:

A potcake named Alpheus

Does Seedwing support plugins?

Generally-speaking, no.

More broadly speaking, also no.

Policies can be written using external::eval<…​>, but that can introduce brittleness into patterns, given a reliance on an external service.

The lack of plugins is two-fold:

  1. Seedwing is implemented in Rust, which is statically-linked, making plugins (and usage of dlopen(3)) a challenge.

  2. For policy portability, to ensure that any policy can execute within any instance of swio, a decision has been taken to include as much as possible into the core.