432

Forgejo is changing its license to a Copyleft license. This blog post will try to bring clarity about the impact to you, explain the motivation behind this change and answer some questions you might have.

...

Developers who choose to publish their work under a copyleft license are excluded from participating in software that is published under a permissive license. That is at the opposite of the core values of the Forgejo project and in June 2023 it was decided to also accept copylefted contributions. A year later, in August 2024, the first pull request to take advantage of this opportunity was proposed and merged.

...

Forgejo versions starting from v9.0 are now released under the GPL v3+ and earlier Forgejo versions, including v8.0 and v7.0 patch releases remain under the MIT license.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] whou@lemmy.ml 91 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

always a pleasure to see big projects going full copyleft amidst the recent influx of projects sadly going source-available

this is the main reason not to sign a CLA (edit: both the aforementioned projects seem to adopt CLAs, though it seems that they aren't hostile and are especially pro-copyleft. see this amazing correction by @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone for context). you should not let a third-party use your copyright to restrict user freedom in the future because they swear "they ❤️ open source" now, and would never use your code to only their own benefit.

[-] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Except both of the projects you just linked too have CLAs, which they updated on switching to AGPLv3. Both use them as a way to offer dual-licensing, so they can charge companies for an AGPL-exception by selling them a proprietary-licensed version, which then supports the FOSS-development. They both were also only able to change to AGPL because of already existing CLAs. At least in Element's case though, they created a two-way commitment in their CLA:

Now, CLAs come in all shapes and sizes: some good and some bad. It’s critical to understand that our reason for requiring one here is to give us the right to sell AGPL exceptions: not to “do a Hashicorp” and switch to a non-FOSS licence in future. We’ve made this clear in the wording of the CLA (using a similar approach to Signal’s CLA) by committing to distributing contributions as FOSS under an OSI-approved licence – many thanks to those who gave feedback on the original announcement to suggest this. You can find the final CLA wording here, derived from the well-respected Apache Software Foundation CLA.

Here's the specific text from the CLA:

Element shall be entitled to make Your Contribution available under Element's proprietary software licence, provided that Element shall also make Your Contribution available under the terms of an OSl-approved open-source license.

I personally consider that a fairly reasonable term. Especially because they specified an OSI-approved license. Element are always going to be bound to that now. This is like the copyleft of contributor license agreements.

[-] whou@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

whoa! thanks a lot! that's my mistake.

thanks for the awesome info, I should've at least check the repo of the individual projects first (only did so with Forgejo).

I totally agree with you, and do think that it is possible to have positive and harmless CLAs. though I do think we should always take a step back and not assume that a project's CLA will be in favor of our copyright, with the case being more the exception than the norm, unfortunately.

in the end, I will always be happy that a copyright holder wants to be able to reliably make money with copyleft software, but I can never really face a CLA without at least initial hostility anymore. you may say I have prejudice against CLAs lol

[-] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah honestly these feelings are so bloody valid after the way they've been used lately. It's always good to be sure of these things.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
432 points (99.5% liked)

Open Source

31358 readers
576 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS