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UniFormal / MMT

The MMT Language and System
https://uniformal.github.io/
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Switch Licensing #433

Open tkw1536 opened 5 years ago

tkw1536 commented 5 years ago

In this weeks systems meeting we reached the following consensus:

  1. switch to a standard license, which one tbd
  2. have every contributor sign a license grant allowing "us" (formal meaning of this tbd) to relicense code
  3. implement a technical solution to have (2) ensured for PRs

See also: #1, #229, #206

tkw1536 commented 5 years ago
lambdaTotoro commented 5 years ago

I also looked around in license world and I would be very happy with the AGPLv3 that Tom mentioned. It comes recommended by both the OSI and the FSF for applications that are run over a network as MMT is in contexts like MathHub. Otherwise, it's based on good' ol GPL.

kohlhase commented 5 years ago

We should consider that AGPL is crafted for server-based web site information systems, this is not really what MMT is (even if is part of MathHub).

Therefor I think GPL3 or LGPL3 is more appropriate. Probably the latter.

lambdaTotoro commented 5 years ago

In today's Systems' Meeting, I was tasked with finding out if there are any OSI-approved licenses that prohibit commercial use (a term that has a tendency to be confusing, so I'd ask everyone to make sure they're on the same page).

I can report that there are none, as that would violate the open source definition, specifically Point 6 of the definition, titled "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". So, it will not be as easy as adding a noncommercial modifier to a license, as is the case with creative commons licensing (in case anyone is wondering, directly using CC for source code is frowned upon and would probably not meet our goals).

We can't enforce no commercial use and be open source. But we can make sure that commercial modifications to the code and derived works are made available to us and the public (ruling out proprietary use) by using a copyleft license (such as AGPL), allowing ourselves to re-license to any OSI-approved license via CLA and selling exceptions (which apparently does not constitute a re-licensing) where applicable.

A full list of the OSI-approved licenses can be found here.