This project is licensed proprietary, not free software, or open source as you call it

[ian-kelling]

Your license.md claim's the project is open source. Open source is software which generally fits under this defintion: https://opensource.org/docs/osd Currently, the license completely proprietary. You only have a warantee disclaimer, which does not grant any rights to anyone.

Pick a license here https://opensource.org/licenses or here https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

Your license.md file says you want it to be open source but not permissive. In that case, I recommend the agpl, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html.

I only open this issue because I think you're software looks really nice, but I have no intention to use or recommend proprietary software whenever I can avoid it.

[technomancy]

I'm interested in making an Atreus-specific derivative as well (the existing site is more complicated/cluttered than is necessary for my customers), but I can't do that with the current license. I would love to know when it can be released with an MIT license so I can integrate it with the rest of my OSS work.

[alerque]

The suggestion of AGPL sounds good to me if pushing hard for community involvement and avoiding too much commercial usage is the goal. MIT would probably free more people up to use this inside other applications, but I don't feel strongly about the need for that.

What I do feel strongly about is that the license for this project needs to get fixed yesterday. See the above linked issue for my reasoning.

Baring any other suggestion or discussion, I would strongly recommend going ahead with the AGPL.

[alerque]

For reference see also #82 where I brought up this issue and the current proprietary license was applied, and #58 for where somebody brought it up even before that.

[BJClark]

+1 for making the project MIT or similar.

[alerque]

@ijprest Can you please give this issue some attention? I know legalese is obnoxious but not picking and declaring a license is stiffing this project and has been for years. If you're not into being permissive towards commercial use a more restrictive license with copy-left requirements is fine (e.g. AGPL or GPL). If you want more help picking such as pros and cons tailored to this project we can help with that but the silence from you on this issue has been deafening. Please?

[xtaran]

What might help is Github's nice "Choose a License" guide on https://choosealicense.com/

[ijprest]

I've got a plan... though it probably won't satisfy everybody.

The current code is pretty much a dead-end, for reasons explained elsewhere. It's bad enough that I actively don't want to encourage people to use/modify it. :)

There is some generally useful stuff, though... so the first step is to modularize/modernize the reusable bits of code (primarily the serialization & rendering code) to actually make it useful to anyone looking at it. (This stuff will be permissively licensed.)

I've made the first move towards that end... the 'deserialization' code has been extracted, modularized, and packaged for consumption by NPM (https://github.com/ijprest/kle-serial).

Once the useful bits are extracted & packaged up nicely, I'm going to start a complete UI rewrite. (I've made a few false starts over the last months, as I experiment with different frameworks.)

[zelch]

Hello @ijprest , I know that 2020 was a pretty hellish year for everyone.

And I know that the plan is to do a fairly significant rewrite.

But getting a license assigned would allow others to do some work on the existing code base, and given that it has been almost two years, it would be really nice to be able to make some basic improvements to the existing code base.

(Existent and sub-optimal is better than perfect but not here.)

[Nova38]

Good evening @ijprest,

I hope this finds you well. Your work on this project is incry. It has been about 2 years ago since your above reply. I was wondering if you had considered some of the ideas expressed in this and some other threads

[mrdudz]

@ijprest +1 For everything said - i have searched for this kind of thing for quite some time and it'd be a shame to let it bitrot away. Allowing this to live on with community support would be very nice!

[WillsterJohnson]

Technically speaking, this is the license;

Keyboard-Layout-Editor
Copyright(C) 2013-2018 by Ian Prest
All rights reserved.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

And this is specifically not part of the license;

* Keyboard-Layout-Editor is free to use, and will remain free to use indefinitely.  
* It is open-source, which allows you to learn from (and contribute to) the tool.
* But it's not permissively licensed!
 * The long-term plan is to eventually open the license up to something really 
   permissive (probably MIT), when the site is closer to feature-complete.
 * In the near-term I would like to avoid forks of the website, since I feel it 
   would cause confusion in the community to have several similar-but-different 
   general-purpose layout editors available.
 * In the meantime, if you have a different use-case in mind that requires a fork 
   (e.g., an editor for a keyboard manufacturer to offer customization options 
   to their customers, integrated with your website and custom branded), then 
   just get in touch and I'll provide you a special license to do so (gratis!).
* I claim no ownership over the input (your keyboard layouts) or output (rendered 
keyboards).  You are free to use the inputs/outputs for any use whatsoever.

The license doesn't address the creation of derivative works, But it's not permissively licensed! is a piece of prose which is not part of this project's license. If a license is ambiguous about derivate works, how could it possibly prevent them?

There's also the point that it has been 1357 days since the original author showed any intent to develop the project further, and longer still than that since the copyright year was updated in line with current year.

---

Anyways, the idea of a keyboard layout editor isn't copyrighted, and the idea of updating code that's over 3 years old doesn't sound fun. So I'm starting from zero here https://github.com/WillsterJohnson/keyboard-layout-editor. Check back in a month or two.