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cohere-coop / nourish.party

Celebrating and nourishing creative communities
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Apply AGPLv3 License #33

Closed zspencer closed 6 years ago

zspencer commented 6 years ago

The APLv3 License was created to close the loophole wherein someone who creates a derivative work can technically host that software and provide it to the public without re-sharing the source code.

This is all well and good, but it also brings in a pile of requirements around how one must present their usage of the license. In particular, it requires the software to "prominently display" the license. I believe placing a link to the source repository and the license in the footer is OK. s.

A stack exchange thread discussing what the APLG does and does not allow is here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/107883/agpl-what-you-can-do-and-what-you-cant

zspencer commented 6 years ago

@jtu0 - Does this answer your question re: Why not GPLv3? And if so, do you have further opinions on license selection?

zspencer commented 6 years ago

@bhaibel and @emdashbuck - do you have a preference between AGPLv3 and GPLv2? Or would you prefer a different license entirely?

dashbuck commented 6 years ago

I'm not super familiar with the different licenses. I can read up on them if you need me to, but if it's okay to instead depend on y'all's interpretations of the licenses-

Here's what I want to be able to do with Nourish in the future:

  1. Offer paid support for Nourish for Nourish partygoers;
  2. Offer custom or paid themes that hook deeply into Nourish;
  3. (maybe) offer paid plugins that extend Nourish.

I don't want to block other people from doing 2 or 3 since that will help adoption.

bhaibel commented 6 years ago

There are some interpretations of the AGPL that would make your Option 3 more difficult, @emdashbuck -- one of the major differences between the GPLv2 and the AGPL is how they treat software-as-a-service products that build upon the licensed software.

All GPLs "infect" software that's built upon them with disclosure requirements -- you need to provide their source to anyone who "uses" the software. As far as the GPLv2 is concerned, if you're building SaaS on top of it then the "users" are the sysadmins of the servers -- you need to provide source to them, but not to anyone else. The AGPL defines "users" more broadly as anyone who uses the service. So, anyone who visited a Nourish site that used a paid plugin would need the source of the paid plugin made available to them -- which might decrease the number of sales for that plugin.

I would love it if Nourish developed a Wordpress-like plugin/theme/etc ecosystem, and I'm okay with some of that ecosystem being closed-source because I think that will enable more money to slosh around in it. So I think I'd prefer the GPLv2 to the AGPL for this project. That bet seems to have worked out for Wordpress.

zspencer commented 6 years ago

@bhaibel - How would you feel about the MIT license or some other, more permissive licensing structure? Do you have a strong leaning in favor of that instead of one with an existing copy-left?

Also, there is the LGPL which is how SideKiq licenses itself, which grants permission for works to be licensed under different licenses, including fully commercial licenses.

I'm torn on this and that's why I want to have the group decide, instead of simply adopting the GPLv2 or MIT or LGPLv3.

bhaibel commented 6 years ago

I like the statement that using a copyleft license makes about the goals and desires of the project, so I'd rather not use a permissive license like MIT, ISC, or Apache. I think I prefer GPL to LGPL but I'm not sure, and if someone feels strongly about LGPL I won't block.

zspencer commented 6 years ago

I think we've reached consensus not to use the APGLv3. Closing this.