Quick FOSS legal literacy quizImagine the following situation: someone takes your whole project and white-labels it (changes the name), then sells it commercially without providing the source code or sharing any of the sales revenue with you.Your proje...
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@drewdevault That does make sense. Maybe I will approach it this way next time.
(In the particular case of my ANTMAMA story, the organization did approve many non-OSI licenses, just the WTFPL wasn't one of them. It might actually just be that this was because the WTFPL was not legally sound. So the story's only relevant insofar as it makes me keenly aware "hm⦠if you create extra work for their legal department, you might wind up making the code unusable altogether")
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@drewdevault Of course it is allowed to provide pre-built binaries of GPL software... provided you are ready to provide the source code of the project as a whole upon request.
The only thing wrong here is pretending that the project as a whole is MIT... but that's not an illegal thing to claim... especially when the license is pretty clear that the software is delivered as is and authors aren't liable to anything.
This is because of issues like this that SBOM tools exist... however imperfect.
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@fabio The TL;DR: WRT GPL it is all about *dsitribution*, not runtime. So you can add other licenses in plugins/libraries on *your* installation to your hearts desire with no problem. But as soon as you *distribute* the whole package with at least one non-GPL plugin/library, you hit the limits. The whole distribution *must* be GPL or compatible. 1/2 @drewdevault @smallcircles
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@fabio This creates a loophole, where you use non-GPL compatible code, say, in a webservice. As you only run but not distribute the software, it's fine. If you want to close this loophole, that's what AGPL does. Now if you run a web service that is AGPL but uses a plugin that NOT (A)GPL or compatible, you are hitting the limits. AGPL demands that the whole thing must be available to any user. HTH 2/2 (IANAL, but 20 years at Red Hat and well versed with license stuff) @drewdevault @smallcircles
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@jwildeboer @drewdevault @smallcircles thanks, that clarifies things a lot.
So I guess that as a developer of an open framework that supports all kind of integrations with all kind of licenses I may have two choices:
Leave everything as it is (MIT license so I donβt bump against the problem of redistributing GPL code with incompatible licenses).
Extract the plugins that use different license schemes, or are built on top of products/libraries with incompatible licenses, into separate packages/repos under different licenses (or maybe a
contrib
repo under MIT/BSD), while the core + the open integrations can then be distributed under GPL.
It sounds like AGPL wouldnβt be a reasonable option either way though. My understanding is that an architecture along the lines of βclone/install the open core, then copy the contrib submodules inside of the same repo and run the whole thing togetherβ wouldnβt be compatible with AGPL, because Iβm actually mixing projects with difference licenses at runtime and providing them as a service.
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@jwildeboer @drewdevault @smallcircles overall, a product like Platypush is very similar in terms of architecture and plugin ecosystem to HomeAssistant. Which, from what I can see, is actually released under Apache license. So I guess that the βpick a liberal license to minimize frictionβ is a common practice with this kind of softwareβ¦
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@fabio Absolutely. And Apache License 2.0 is good license for that, IMHO. Here's my word of wisdom from years of these discussions: You will never be able to make everyone happy. Finding the right license (combination) is unsolvable problem. You will never please all fundamentalists, but you can make a lot of pragmatic people happy. Don't worry too much. And if needed, feel free to set up a call with me to discuss. Happy to help and share! @drewdevault @smallcircles
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@ehashman @todd @drewdevault 100% because they are pleasantly leading questions. Iβm faced with a real world question on the GPL and thereβs so much nuance I feel like I need a lawyer
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@reconbot @ehashman @todd you could post your question to the WFS licensing subforum:
https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/c/licenses/5
I'll pitch in with whatever knowledge I can.