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A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

element.io

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Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#51

Post by freedomben »

ensignavenger wrote: post #46
freedomben wrote: post #35

There are two related but separate issues here that need to be considered: 1. Relicense to AGPLv3 2. New CLA in place for contributions. For a project like Matrix, the move to AGPLv3 seems clearly a good one. This is not just a library that you add to your app, it's a product in and of itself, and it's been getting abused by proprietary companies who are robbing the ecosystem. From the blog post from Element[1][2]: >…

I think the AGPLv3 is a poor choice for what is essentially the reference implementation of the Matrix Protocol. The whole point of a protocol is to allow different implementations. Having a base implementation that others can freely fork and develop into whatever they want with whatever license model they want is a good thing for the protocol. I can understand if the Foundation were to maintain a very basic referenc…

This is an interesting point and does sound good in theory, although in practice it's just the for-profit proprietary companies who are doing the forking and expanding, and then making a ton of money and not contributing anything back to the reference implementation.

I do also dislike the CLA, but I'm torn because if anybody should be making the money from these custom extensions/implementations, it should be the company who does 95% of the core contributions, and I don't see a way to do that without the CLA. Not that my opinion matters as I'm not connected at all to Element or any other players, but just generally speaking I'd love to hear potential solutions to the problem that don't require a CLA

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#52

Post by runiq »

jraph wrote: post #27
vbezhenar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to sell sources with alternative license, it's part of their business plan, so CLA is unavoidable.

If I understand correctly: Synapse and Dendrite have been under Apache 2.0 so far, which would allow anyone to turn them into proprietary products. Including Element. With this change, the situation is: Element can make them proprietary but no one else.

Not exactly, but close.

The CLA gives them the ability to relicense, which affects proprietary products built on top of Synapse/Dendrite. Without the CLA, all code written against the AGPL-licensed Synapse/Dendrite would have to be licensed AGPL as well, even if it interacts with Synapse/Dendrite over network boundaries as part of a SAAS offering or somesuch.

I believe that's why 'AGPL' is a four letter word in certain circles.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#53

Post by freedomben »

tpush wrote: post #47
Arathorn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If folks want to keep their contributions on their own fork and not sign a CLA that's fine too. Yes, we're trying to monetise our code in order to pay folks to keep working on it.

Yes, I can choose not to contribute. But I'm not able to sell commercial licenses of your contributions. This fundemental asymmetry is incredibly unfortunate for a project whose stated mission is being a fundamental communication layer.

I would fully agree if your contribution were 50%, or even 10% of the code base. But if your contribution makes up 0.001% of the code base, and theirs makes up 95%, I think there is a much bigger fundamental asymmetry already at play that changes the fairness math a bit.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#54

Post by lifty »

I welcome this change, with the hope that they will be able to release higher quality server implementations resulting from this change. Question to @Arathorn: is there a plan to consolidate and have a single server implementation? I would love if Dendrite would become the reference implementation and have something works both for self-hosters and big deployments.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#57

Post by Macha »

phoronixrly wrote: post #55

How refreshing, an open-source company choosing the AGPL instead of some contrived homebrew license! I welcome this change - as I've stated multiple times here, we need more AGPL-licensed software!

AGPL+CLA that assigns copyright to them. So element can do anything but others are held to the AGPL.

I mean, it's better than SSPL, but considering how heavily they've marketed in the past on matrix being truly open, it's a little disappointing that they've chosen to go to asymmetric openness.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#58

Post by tommiegannert »

> We believe in open source because it encourages innovation

Sorry, but I was not amused when Dendrite decided to stop accepting PRs because they are a small team. That is far from encouraging innovation. To me, it seemed like lacking in sustainable FOSS management. PRs I sent were rewritten, squashed and merged by the Dendrite team, instead of them just doing reviews and asking me to fix what they considered unfitting(substandard/wrong.

I never thought I'd say that a FOSS team is doing too much work, but it seems to me they burned out for some reason. I can only speculate as to the cause. Changing the license is not going to fix that problem.

Anyway, I'm still an active Matrix user, and am grateful for all the work they do put into the projects. I just thought it was more fun to be able to contribute.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#59

Post by ensignavenger »

bogwog wrote: post #41
ensignavenger wrote: post #9

This really sucks. I have always had great hope for the Matrix protocol. The AGPL isn't my favorite open source license, but it has its place... but a CLA? That is a complete nonstarter. No one should ever sign a CLA that gives a company more rights to your contributions than you get from theirs.

> No one should ever sign a CLA that gives a company more rights to your contributions than you get from theirs. Why not? I've signed CLAs to contribute to open source projects that I use every day. These projects already offer me tremendous value for free, and while my contributions may help other people, they mostly help me since they tend to be fixes for problems that I personally have with them. Having the fix co…

There have been GPL/AGPL projects in the past that used CLAs and gone propeietary... I don't have the details at the moment, but I prefer to the ounce of prevention, rather than waiting for it to happen to me.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#60

Post by ryukafalz »

runiq wrote: post #52
jraph wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly: Synapse and Dendrite have been under Apache 2.0 so far, which would allow anyone to turn them into proprietary products. Including Element. With this change, the situation is: Element can make them proprietary but no one else.

Not exactly, but close. The CLA gives them the ability to relicense, which affects proprietary products built on top of Synapse/Dendrite. Without the CLA, all code written against the AGPL-licensed Synapse/Dendrite would have to be licensed AGPL as well, even if it interacts with Synapse/Dendrite over network boundaries as part of a SAAS offering or somesuch. I believe that's why 'AGPL' is a four letter word in certa…

No, that's a common misconception. The relevant section of the license is:

> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.

This does not state that you must license any of your software that interacts with the AGPL code over the network as AGPL, merely that you make modified versions of the AGPL code available to users who interact with it over the network licensed as AGPL. The rest of the license generally behaves as the GPL would.

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