chrisbbreuer
commented
1 year ago Why not simply choose the MIT license?
Open mikemaccana opened 1 year ago
chrisbbreuer
commented
1 year ago Why not simply choose the MIT license?
Issue description
A discussion came up recently regarding the Metaplex MPL license. The license at https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex-program-library/blob/master/LICENSE has the title "METAPLEX(TM) NFT OPEN SOURCE LICENSE" but the license itself isn't an open source license:
That license includes:
Which conflicts with part 6 of the Open Source definition - the rules that define what Open Source is.
Likewise MPL wouldn't quality for Free Software either - to be free software, the license needs to meet the free software definition, the "METAPLEX(TM) NFT OPEN SOURCE LICENSE" license doesn't meet the 'Use' freedom
Compare this with well known open source projects:
While people can view MPL's source code in github, the source code doesn't currently have an open source license.
The main concern is that people might be working on Solana commercially (whether their code is open source or not) and believe they can read and use MPL's source code when the current license says they cannot.
I fully believe this to be an innocent mistake and Metaplex can easily fix it depending on how and what they want to do:
Pick an existing open source license. Many projects use MIT which is popular for people that want to allow anyone to use their code. If you want to ensure that there aren't non-open-source forks of Metaplex, Metaplex could pick GPL2 or something more restrictive.
Update the existing license name and other materials to avoid describing Metaplex as open source.
Create a new license that meets the open source definition (this is a hassle as well known open source licenses have been reviewed by lawyers).
Totally up to Metaplex to determine what Metaplex thinks is best. It's your code.