Please consider a change of license

[fmbarina]

hayabusa is currently licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. According to this license, a user may:

• Share the unmodified licensed content.
• Modify it...
  • ...but only when required to exercise other licensed rights, per Section 2(a)(4).
• Not share and modify at the same time.

This matters because it seems that this license is incompatible with GH pull requests. By making a fork, you are exercising the right to share unmodified licensed content. When you make changes to that fork, however, you're breaking the terms of the license, since that is not technically required to exercise the other licensed rights.

This is one of multiple known issues with CC licensed software. Creative Commons recommends against using CC licenses for software, suggesting that you pick a free or open source license instead.

And this is just my opinion, but... While I cannot claim to understand your intentions for choosing CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, I'm not sure if it would make all that much sense even if there weren't issues with such a decision.

• Attribution protection is extremely common in software licenses.
• I imagine hayabusa is primarily used by folks who like looking at pretty terminals, so commercial uses aren't abundant.
• Allowing derivative works or not is entirely your choice, but it might harm the project:
  • There's the PR issue I mentioned above.
  • Should you lose interest or abandon the project, it's effectively dead. Users aren't legally allowed to keep it alive.
  • If you worry that a fork will "take over" and stray from your original vision for hayabusa, I don't think it's a real problem for many reasons, but I'll refrain from getting into that since it might not even be the case.

For these reasons, I think it'd be good for hayabusa to consider a license change. I don't know if permission from other contributors is necessary to do so, but even if that's the case, it should be possible to ask all of them for it since their number is still relatively small.

Finally, hayabusa's pretty neat, thanks for developing it.

P.S. I'm playing around with the code and already see changes I'd like to contribute properly, so maybe this request is a bit selfish. I hope you'll consider it, regardless.

[Notarin]

Not selfish, thanks for the issue, I'll look into alternative licenses. My reasoning for picking such a restrictive license is for the fact that once I license an IP, that version is permanently licensed, I can always loosen the restrictions on the license, tightening them is not as simple, so I picked a rather restrictive one, and I'll just now loosen it. thanks for informing me of the issue with forks too.

[erwin]

Some licenses that might be more appropriate and in the spirit of your original Non-Commercial license selection are:

• https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
• https://commonsclause.com/ combined with MIT or BSD license
• I try to keep a full list of "Fair Code" licenses listed at: https://os.cash/license#faircode I've still got a few to catch up on that I hope to have online next week...

The idea of "Fair Code" is that developer's should not forfeit all of the rights they have over the software they create.