workadventure
License info missing
It is not a tech issue, but important to know for a number of people. Currently there is no license in this project mentioned. This means it is not Open Source. Please clarify the license of the project. Thank you.
Hey @mariobehling ,
The repo is actually made of several directories with distinct licences. You can find the licenses in the sub-directories.
The important directories are front/back/pusher and the licence for these is AGPL + Commons Clause (so AGPL with an additional restriction of not reselling the WorkAdventure as a SAAS solution, aka the anti-Amazon clause).
Thank you for the info! I do not want to make this a pedantic issue for you, but I would like to give a suggestion.
In order to make it easier to find the licenses, I would like to suggest that you add this info to the root. As you are using AGPL + Commons Clause in most directories you could even add this as LICENSE into root and it would show up in listings of your repository.
Looking more in detail I cannot find a License in all subdirectories which would mean they are strictly copyright. If you accept contributions of other people in those folders this means they are strictly copyrighted by contributors as well. Contributors could even withdraw their contributions in future as far as I understand and this could even cause issues for you. So, you might look into it and ensure that all folders and files are licensed, e.g. by adding a License into the root.
By the way, if you had not told me that you are using AGPL + Commons Clause I would not have realized it by looking at the file. Most devs do not scroll down entirely and read all clauses. Usually we look at the name and we know. To make this clear maybe add the info into the license file heading "AGPL + Commons Clause".
On a sidenote, we are developing an Open Source licensed event management solution hosted at eventyay.com and we are always excited to add features and components. Apart from our core components a lot of work goes into integrating all kinds of projects. Currently we are working on integrating Jitsi and Big Blue Button for example.
We are funding the development by obtaining a ticket fee from people who are selling tickets. In this sense our service is commercial. If we would have to make a business agreement with each developer or dev org to be able to use their components in our app it would have been a huge overhead for us and we would have never been able to build what we build.
We liked what we saw from your project at the rc3 event, but it would not be possible to integrate it in future with our project due to your license choice. The commons clause does not only prevent Amazon from using it, it excludes every project that has even modest sales from using your project.
When people ask me about a license I recommend to look at the use cases. If they want to prevent large corporations from taking advantage and consider the commons clause I ask them how likely would it be that large corporations would really take their project and resell it. For me Open Source is not just a license but a way to collaborate. The commons clause can also limit and even prevent collaborations of different projects.
I do not know if this is an important point for you here, but I thought it might be relevant to share this. In any case this is a cool project! Thanks for the fun of using it.
Maybe the BSL license would be a good choice to allow people using it but not selling it as SaaS (which probably is what you want). Example with good FAQ about the license: https://github.com/venueless/venueless#license-faq
Hey @mariobehling, hey @asmaps ,
Thanks a lot for your suggestions!
2 things here:
- We will make the license way more visible in the future. We are preparing a FAQ page and we plan to remove all the directories that are not AGPL+commons clause from the main repository. That will allow us to move the license at the root of the project, as most people expect.
- The choice of the license is quite complex. We want to keep WorkAdventure as open as possible, but we also need to make it sustainable (otherwise, we won't be able to keep working on it). I think we need to find a working business model, and derive the license from it. I very much value both your advices. The license to be applied is still an open issue and it might slightly vary in the future, as we choose a business model. Your inputs are very welcome!
Is it necessary to put the frontend under Commons Clause, too? That might disallow to put ads on the page as well as paid accounts on instances (conferences, members-only instances for organizations with membership fees) who try to cover their server costs that way, but deployed work adventure themself.
And your Commons Clause addition might be void, since AGPL says “If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term”
I believe AGPL and Commons Clause to be mutually incompatible.
Quoting Commons Clause FAQ:
The combined text replaces the existing license, allowing all permissions of the original license to remain except the ability to "Sell" the software as defined in the text.
Quoting GNU Licenses FAQ:
The GNU GPL is designed specifically to prevent the addition of further restrictions. GPLv3 allows a very limited set of them, in section 7, but any other added restriction can be removed by the user.
I understand the need to find a right business model to make WorkAdventure sustainable. I believe AGPL by itself and a very easy to lend private rooms would work. Any competitors working who would provide WorkAdventure for their own customer would have to make their codebase available. That means you would benefit from any improvements they would make.
Given you currently own the brand and the domain name, I don’t believe anyone without special needs or very little budget would take the hassle of making their own deployment. But those with very little budget like me would still have an interest to contribute to the code (and thus increase WorkAdventure general value, therefore your sales).
I think each contribution might hold risk to the project, as it violates the AGPL (or better copyright infringement)
I think if you have the strong community and good ideas for modular business approaches (maybe we can help with providing good examples?) it is ok to go Open Core at least. makes it more straight forward. AGPL is already quite strong so some might want to get a payed license (is this even possible with AGPL integrated/adapted/remixed?)..
Eitherway keep us posted :+1: thx
But at l
Looks like the current license is (by accident) just AGPL. The "Commons Clause" can be removed or ignored according to the current wording of the LICENSE.txt files, and the wording cannot be changed to prevent that. See #2317
* We will make the license way more visible in the future.
The above was written by the end of 2020, as of today I was still lost while looking for a license, did anything happen here ?
