This commit obviously denotes a re-license of all applicable parts of
the code base. Acknowledgement of this change was completed in #274 by
the majority of the current set of contributors. From here henceforth
all changes will be AGPL licensed and distributed. This is purely an
effort to maintain the same copy-left policy whilst closing the
(perceived) SaaS loophole the GPL allows for. It is merely for this
loophole: to avoid code hiding by any potential "network providers" who
are attempting to use the project to make a profit without either
compensating the authors or re-distributing their changes.
I thought quite a bit about this change and can't see a reason not to
close the SaaS loophole in our current license. We still are (hard)
copy-left and I plan to keep the code base this way for a couple
reasons:
- The code base produces income/profit through parent projects and is
demonstrably of high value.
- I believe firms should not get free lunch for the sake of
"contributions from their employees" or "usage as a service" which
I have found to be a dubious argument at best.
- If a firm who intends to profit from the code base wants to use it
they can propose a secondary commercial license to purchase with the
proceeds going to the project's authors under some form of well
defined contract.
- Many successful projects like Qt use this model; I see no reason it
can't work in this case until such a time as the authors feel it
should be loosened.
There has been detailed discussion in #103 on licensing alternatives.
The main point of this AGPL change is to protect the code base for the
time being from exploitation while it grows and as we move into the next
phase of development which will include extension into the multi-host
distributed software space.
Tyler Goodlet
goodboy