search

voxxrin / voxxrin3

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
9 stars 2 forks source link

Discuss: Consider switching to AGPL v3 LICENSE ? #48

Closed fcamblor closed 9 months ago

fcamblor commented 9 months ago

Ahead of Voxxrin's public exposure during Devoxx in 1 week, I'd like to be clear about the license used on the project.

We're currently using Apache v2, and have been since the start of the project (first commit including content on the repository).

However, the Apache v2 license currently in use may allow anyone to:

  1. fork the project from any commit
  2. develop new features in closed source
  3. deploy them on a site, without disclosing their modifications to the community

The value of a service like Voxxrin resides mainly in the data (conferences that have been crawled and displayed on the site, participant preferences such as favorites, feedbacks and watch later...).

Because of the "public" nature of the Firebase database, I think it would be detrimental to the project to have closed source forks of the project, which could rely on the same public Firebase database.

Apache v2 license, which is not strongly copyleft (it permits modification without redistribution) goes against this point, hence my desire today, and before there have been any further diverse contributions, to change the license.

AGPL v3 is more restrictive on this point and seems a better choice: if someone makes modified Voxxrin source code available on the networks, then that person is obliged to publish the modified code as opensource.

To be clear, this won't prevent the proliferation of Voxxrin client applications [*], but it does prevent the closed source proliferation of these applications, which is already a significant point for me.

[*] They may be necessary for white-label applications like Devoxx Mobile anyway

fcamblor commented 9 months ago

@xhanin @robinlopez as contributors on the Apache v2 licenced code, I'd need your 👍 / 👎 on this one (even though it won't be retroactive) if you don't mind :-)