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emitter-io / emitter

High performance, distributed and low latency publish-subscribe platform.
https://emitter.io
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Software Licensing Question #258

Closed JohnRoesler closed 5 years ago

JohnRoesler commented 5 years ago

I understand there are likely thought out reasons and motivations for Emitter choosing the AGPL. I realize this is a long shot, but have you considered relicensing it under a permissive license such as MIT, Apache, or even just GPL?

StephanSchuster commented 5 years ago

I am also very interested in this topic as AGPL is a real problem in our case.

Florimond commented 5 years ago

Hello @JohnRoesler and @StephanSchuster,

what exactly do you want to do that is not allowed by AGPL? I can't remember exactly the discussions we had when choosing this licence, but I can pass the message and maybe discuss it again with the team...

rum-runner commented 5 years ago

I have worked for several companies that do not allow AGPL. Here is an example that is often shared when I have asked them why:

Say you're building a service that is made up of many micro services - it is unclear from the AGPL license and legal precedents whether or not you could be forced to make public your entire codebase for a project if an AGPL product is used as a component. In this case - if you were building a service that used emitter to pass messages between micro services you would not want to be forced to share back all the elements not directly related to the emitter codebase.

Basically, they view it as not a risk worth taking. I would love to contribute back to emitter and could see using it at my current company if a different license was selected so that the legal folks would allow us to use it.

Not sure if others face the same - but that is my perspective.

StephanSchuster commented 5 years ago

What @rum-runner described is exactly the same issue I face in my company. That's a pity because otherwise emitter seems to be a perfect fit.

Another issue I'm seeing is with all the Eclipse PAHO based client SDKs for emitter: PAHO is based on EPL1.0 and EDL 1.0 which AFAIK suffers from the same limitations as AGPL that @rum-runner described ("make public your entire codebase"). Correct me if I'm wrong.

JohnRoesler commented 5 years ago

I see that as the main issue also. An article I was reading the other day says it well IMO - from tech republic

The collateral damage in this bargain, however, is developers. Developers want to get stuff done with a minimum of overhead (be it infrastructure or lawyers). In fact, this shift toward permissive licensing has become so pronounced that on GitHub it's still far too common for projects not to have a license at all.

Florimond commented 5 years ago

After briefly discussing this with our guru, it seems like the AGPL shouldn't be a problem. Like it's not a problem for all the people using projects like MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-agpl

Note however that it is NOT required that applications using mongo be published. The copyleft applies only to the mongod and mongos database programs. This is why Mongo DB drivers are all licensed under an Apache license. You application, even though it talks to the database, is a separate program and “work”.

stale[bot] commented 5 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.