Change license to Apache License 2.0 (was (A)GPL v3)

tzaeschke commented 9 years ago

EDIT

As you may have noticed, the license never got updated to AGPL. After some consideration, I came to the conclusion that the permissive Apache Software License 2.0 (ASL) may be a better option.

Rationale:

While (A)GPL ensure that only other open-source software can use ZooDB, ASL will allow more easy use of ZooDB by all software, including open source software that has licenses that are incompatible with GPL, as well as closed source software.
Furthermore, the JTA library (used by the JDO API) is licensed under CDDL, which is incompatible with (A)GPL. Strictly speaking, if ZooDB was licensed with GPL, it could not legally be used with JDO. There are some workarounds, such as using API exclusion terms together with GPL, but these complicate licensing further and may in the end be prohibitive.

All contributions from other authors are still in separate branches, so agreement by other authors is not required for anything in the master branch. However, I would appreciate feedback and it would be nice if the whole repository could be moved to ASL.

So once more: If you contributed at some point to ZooDB, please state your agreement/disagreement in the comments below. Thanks!

Previous text

We plan to change the license to Affero-GPL (AGPL).

In the near future it won't make a difference, because: a) there is no separate ZooDB server b) if there would be a separate server, it could only be accessed through the ZooDB client

It may however may make sense if we decide to allow queries directly on the server, for example via SQL.

There is currently no plan to migrate to a more permissive license. The idea is that different licenses, such as Apache License 2.0, can be used for 'drivers' (similar to MongoDB: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/103832439/the-agpl) or plugins. We'll have to see whether the JDO API can be considered a driver (JDO is under Apache License 2.0).

If you contributed at some point to ZooDB, please state your agreement/disagreement in the comments below. Thanks!

bvancea commented 9 years ago

I understand your points about the possibility of executing SQL directly on the server and I agree with the license change.

jonasnick commented 9 years ago

Sounds reasonable, I agree.

tgmuender commented 9 years ago

I agree to change the license to AGPL.

tzaeschke commented 9 years ago

Cool, thanks everybody.

tzaeschke commented 8 years ago

I just updated the title and text to indicate change of envisaged license.

tzaeschke / zoodb

Change license to Apache License 2.0 (was (A)GPL v3) #74