Re-license as AGPLv3* #275
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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.
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Redo of #274 but just fixing the commit message 😂 (which had a wrong license version number)..
I'm pedantic and would rather not have a non-existent license version in the history, lul.
Already force pushed master to remove that commit (sorry lurkerz if you pulled).
Just putting this up to get the merge commit; sign offs from contribs were already acked in #274 despite the wrong AGPL version mentioned in the GH issue commit message. The patch set was all correct.