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victims / victims-lib-java

The victims library containing the hashing logic for java specific artifacts.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
5 stars 8 forks source link

Change the license to some less restrictive, e.g. MIT. #50

Open OndraZizka opened 6 years ago

OndraZizka commented 6 years ago

The current AGPL blocks Victims from being used by other open source projects, like Windup.

OndraZizka commented 6 years ago

See also https://github.com/victims/victims-client-java-legacy/issues/40

ashcrow commented 6 years ago

That's a fair request. The AGPL license was originally chosen to avoid folks from taking the components, hosting them themselves and giving nothing back to the wider community. We've done some changes recently like making the license of the data less restrictive. To be fair the license was chosen when there was one server and one client and it was easy to just keep the two the same.

I do feel like the server side should stay AGPL, but clients could be different. However, I feel it would be inappropriate of me to try to change this repos license myself when I've not actually provided any code for it 😆.

@abn, @gcmurphy, @skavanagh, @fweimer, @seanf WDYT?

OndraZizka commented 6 years ago

I am no licenses expert, rather barely know anything about licenses, but isn't AGPL state that usage of online service is also subject of the licensing and requires the client to be AGPL too?

fweimer commented 6 years ago

The exact AGPL requirements and what is needed for compliance are unclear. The only clear-cut case is in an interactive web server scenario with a simple web framework, where it can be easy to add a download the source code of this page link to the page footer and include that as a feature of the software (much like a copyright banner on stratup). For non-interactive services and services which do not use a generic transport such as HTTP, it is unclear how to make sure that users who modify the software can easily stay compliant.

To clarify, I'm not worried about intentional non-compliance. The problem with the AGPL is that a lot of the software which is licenses under it provides zero help to the user to comply with its source code distribution terms, in case the user wants to run modified software.