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tecnickcom / tcexam

TCExam is a CBA (Computer-Based Assessment) system (e-exam, CBT - Computer Based Testing) for universities, schools and companies, that enables educators and trainers to author, schedule, deliver, and report on surveys, quizzes, tests and exams.
http://www.tcexam.org
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Additional terms in license conflict with the chosen AGPL license #418

Closed ssddanbrown closed 8 months ago

ssddanbrown commented 10 months ago

Hello,

I noticed you define extra terms upon your AGPLv3 license. I totally respect your right to protect your efforts and work and distribute it how you want to, but my concern is that the contradictory licensing, and advertising as open source with this licensing, could be confusing and/or potentially misleading.

I am not a lawyer or legal expert by any means, but I often read into open source licensing. While section 7 of the license does allow additional terms to be supplemented, it sets accepted types/categories of those terms which can be added, before stating:

All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

While I think your second additional term (In regard to respecting the trademark) probably fits into the categories of section 7, I don't think the first (Branding requirements preventing certain modification) does as far as I can tell. Therefore, I believe users could just remove that additional term as per the quoted AGPL line above.

In addition, since you state FOSS as a key feature, I believe preventing modification in that way will also go against both the free software definition, and open source definition, since you limit modification and potentially discriminate against groups or fields of endeavour (commercial/competitive user).

Let me know if I've misunderstood though. If it helps have a similar user-case, I raised something similar with metabase. By default, the AGPL scares a lot of business anyway. They provide the code under AGPL, but they also allow certain use under a separate optional license that requires the branding to remain, or purchase their commercial license. Of course this requires having the ability to re-license your codebase which I assume you do since you are already licensing under a commercial license, which I assume is not under AGPL? Although, I noticed you're using a radius library with this license which might complicate matters as it's GPLv3.

nicolaasuni commented 8 months ago

The LICENSE.TXT file was update on version 16.3.1. There should not be any ambiguity now.

ssddanbrown commented 8 months ago

Thanks for updating and clarifying matters!