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gloebit / opensim-moneymodule-gloebit

OpenSim addon module integrating with the Gloebit digital currency service
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
8 stars 12 forks source link

Added Contributors.txt and "licensed under LGPL" to top of all files #69

Closed colosi closed 6 years ago

colosi commented 6 years ago

In addition to checking the code (which is all comments for this checkin), please do the following:

  1. Review the EUPL (https://choosealicense.com/licenses/eupl-1.2/) and make sure you don't have any concerns. The goal here is to have the best (most popular, simplest to interpret, least friction) license which forces sharing of improvements while not requiring open sourcing of entire product which utilizes this library (weak copyleft LGPL style) and includes SaaS as "distribution" for purposes of copyleft (Affero GPL style). Here are a few particular things that I want to make sure we're comfortable with before choosing this license

    • Is it truly weak copyleft? I've seen it described as both weak and strong. It doesn't specify a linking exception. It leaves it up to copyright law what is a derivative work and what is not.
    • Does this preserve SaaS protection? It lists the GPL and LGPL as compatible licenses in the appendix. If it doesn't prevent someone from making minor changes and relicensing under a non-affero license, are we better off just going with the LGPL? If we were going to go with the LGPL and not have SaaS protection, why not just go permissive and just try to convince everyone to contribute back?
    • While disclaiming most liability, it explicitly states "Licensor will be liable under statutory product liability laws as far such laws apply to the Work." It's unclear to me how this is different from what it just disclaimed and if we're taking on any risk which other open source licenses would not.

  2. I've added a contributors.txt. Take a look. I've tried to include references to the libraries we use, which is a standard I saw. Is this good? Am I missing anything?

  3. After doing some research, I believe that we can license this software under a single license. Only the GMM ever had any code which wasn't ours. Most of this has been removed or was a public interface (nothing of any substantial IP). I don't see this as a derivative work, and even if it was the BSD is permissive enough to allow relicensing as long as the copyright and disclaimers are maintained. I have maintained them within this single file with a preamble. This will only matter for our OpenSim module, as any porting to another platform would require changing of anything remaining which could have come from the SampleMoneyModule.

colosi commented 6 years ago

Github has a flow for adding a license. Once I know for sure that we want the EUPL v1.2, I'll follow this flow to create the license file - https://help.github.com/articles/adding-a-license-to-a-repository/

colosi commented 6 years ago

I'm leaning going LGPL rather than AGPL. Unless people really read strong copyleft as not applying when the code is a fully separate library, I think we'd really limit our usage to enforce open sourcing of the code of anyone who wants to use our code. We could also consider AGPL on the API and LGPL or permissive on the glue (GMM.cs), though this overly complicates the licensing.

And again, if we're going to go with the LGPL, should we just consider a permissive license?

colosi commented 6 years ago

Reading this - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/

Leaning LGPL. In the case of GPL, there is a lot to lose to not get around the GPL, so the SaaS hole is a big one. In the case of the LGPL, the hole is smaller in a sense. This isn't about a company's proprietary services, but rather about choosing not to contribute back to the LGPL project. The incentive there is smaller, which is probably why there is no ALGPL.

bradkittenbrink commented 6 years ago

I'm liking LGPL. From the perspective of sharing the GloebitAPI etc classes with other client integrations, I suspect that requiring people to contribute back would be a good thing for them (compared to more permissive licenses) to encourage clients to share improvements with each other

colosi commented 6 years ago

I've adjusted the header to that for the LGPL. Please take a look and make sure it looks right.