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AGPL License is misapplied

Open ian-kelling opened this issue 1 year ago • 6 comments

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The file LICENSE-AGPL says at the top: "This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."

That is good, since the license itself says to do that in the section: "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs".

However, that section of the license is missing! Notice this from the license: "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.", and I believe that includes chopping off a whole section. To fix this, just put that section back in.

The second problem is that your toml files include lines that says license = "AGPL-3.0-only", that is actually a different license than you specified LICENSE-AGPL. The SPDX identifier for what is in LICENSE-AGPL is AGPL-3.0-or-later. Please clarify which one you meant. Without clarification I will assume you meant or-later, since that is what is in the license file. To understand these issues, please read https://www.gnu.org/licenses/identify-licenses-clearly.en.html and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html.

I also encourage you to use the or-later version of GPL, because the FSF could make a better license one day, and it makes your code have a compatible license with more existing code, for example GNU emacs. People could much more easily port emacs code & emacs extensions to Zed if you use the or-later version. And, if you do, I'll also seriously take a look at contributing to porting zed to GNU/Linux.

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If applicable, attach your ~/Library/Logs/Zed/Zed.log file to this issue.

If you only need the most recent lines, you can run the zed: open log command palette action to see the last 1000.

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ian-kelling avatar Jan 24 '24 18:01 ian-kelling

Hi, thank you for reaching out and - the AGPL being cut-off was an oversight on my end and I am sorry for that. I've opened up a PR to address both of your points.

osiewicz avatar Jan 24 '24 18:01 osiewicz

Awesome! Thanks.

ian-kelling avatar Jan 24 '24 18:01 ian-kelling

So to rephrase, one of the issues there is that we're missing a part of "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs" that contains the following:

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

If so, I believe we do already have that section in LICENSE-AGPL - link. Admittedly, it is not on a single line.

osiewicz avatar Jan 24 '24 18:01 osiewicz

FWIW, you might find value in adding support for https://reuse.software/ to the repository. GitHub doesn't support it just yet, but you can symlink the licenses in LICENSES/ to your root directory which will help GitHub out.

It makes it super handy for managing licensing and copyright, especially if you pull in things to your repository that don't abide by the same license. For instance, I vendor git-prompt.sh in my dotfiles which is GPL-2.0-only, but reuse makes it really easy for people to understand that.

Just a drive-by thought in case you want automation around licensing.

To get a bill of materials from a repository:

reuse spdx

To lint a repository:

reuse lint

GitHub Action: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-action

tristan957 avatar Jan 24 '24 19:01 tristan957

I've merged the associated PR, but let's leave the issue open just in case.

osiewicz avatar Jan 27 '24 12:01 osiewicz

Can't open dmg image by license (issue?) (2.2 (b), 2.2 (d)). ¯_(ツ)_/¯ In case I accept it, I can't read this repo?

gordio avatar Feb 25 '24 06:02 gordio

@gordio I assume you mean more or less https://x.com/fasterthanlime/status/1795156090025370094?s=46&t=Nguu_RjCDJ0vFE1pNvBp2Q? If so then yeah, our EULA should be updated in the near future to close out that loophole. Read our source away to your heart's delight. Excerpt from our Discord server on the matter: image

osiewicz avatar May 31 '24 22:05 osiewicz