Licensing issues

[comradekingu]

Outside of laudable ethical merit, the unlicense and similar licenses become problematic in practice.

Unlicense is an additional license for the Weblate list of licenses. Weblate has a provision for adding all strings into a stringpool all the projects can use, but it would be much better if the license supported this directly.

Some jurisdictions actually allow public domain licensing. This means the protections (or restrictions if you will) of other licenses become incompatible. What is considered a work differs too, and with copyleft the whole thing has the potential to be tainted by licenses that half-way work. As long as it doesn't work fully, which is the case for anything that accepts changes from a lot of people, it isn't actually beneficial.

More about this liberapay/liberapay.com#564 (comment)

Since the maintainter is the only contributor so far, it is a perfect time to change the license to something else.
I like copyleft licenses because they protect forks of the project from being made closed source software, but if you just want something simple, MIT is good.

Edit: https://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/cdip_13/cdip_13_inf_6.docx is a good read, but it doesn't answer whether Italian law allows putting works into the public domain by voluntarily waiving the default copyright assigned upon creation. Moral rights in Italian copyright law are eternal, so I suppose not. Even so that would mean it can't be fully public domain until copyright expires.

From the WIPO document Given that both UK law and the relevant international treaties and European Directives1 are not qualified in any way to allow voluntary acts that reduce the term of protection, the conclusion must be that copyright must subsist for the entire term stipulated by law.2

For these and other reasons, Johnson argues that any dedication to the public domain is at most a copyright license and as such the author can revoke it. While there is no obligation for the author to enforce the copyright, the user of the work will rely on the good faith of the person making the dedication, and at most it can be seen “as a political statement”.3

[michelesalvador]

Allan, thank you for your contribution.
I admit I don't understand anything about legal stuff.
I chose the Unlicense because seemed to me the more "free". But of course I can change it.

When I requested hosting in Weblate, they proposed me to adopt a GNU GPL-3 license.
Also @pacoriviere suggested a GPL license in his post.

What do you think about a GPL-3 license?

[comradekingu]

@michelesalvador
How free it is depends on some factors. The public domain doesn't actually happen (overall) with many contributors in different jurisdictions, and while I am no legal expert, it does create some issues.

How free something is depends on what you value. Small licenses protect the software as it is, and everyone is free to create their version of it that is closed source.

The bigger licenses have protections against all sorts of things, and are more complex, but you are then assured nobody can mix and match, and the source code is always free no matter what you do to it.

GPLv3 is good, but AGPLv3 is a better fit. This is because it adds a network protection.
Otherwise someone can serve the software over a network as a service, and not have to share the source code. Make sure you pick the "or later/+" because then you can (optionally) update to A/GPLv4+ when/if it is ever released.

[michelesalvador]

I agree to choose the "or later" version of the license.

Whereas about the Affero GPL, as I understand it preserves from a very remote concatenation of events:

• Someone improves the code of Family Gem
• He puts it on a server to release it as a service
• I come to know this thing
• I want to obtain the code of the improvements
• That person doesn't want to share them
• I become sad about it

Because of this improbability, I think that the GNU GPL v3.0 is the right solution that satisfies everyone.

[comradekingu]

That narrows it down. I should think all eventualities encompasses the something for everyone fully.
I am not sure how many uses there are of removing "distribute" by serving something over a network, but if you don't want the license to not cover those, none are actually good.
AGPLv3 maintains compatibility with GPLv3 (in section 13)
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility It is thus the same as GPLv3 here.

[michelesalvador]

Half of your sentences are incomprehensible to me, sorry!

Yes, it's clear to me that AGPLv3 is compatible with GPLv3.
But, as I wrote before, the "network abuse" covered by AGPL is really remote in practice. I'd say impossible.
Whereas I like the GPL license because is more common. Everyone knows it and everyone will feel immediately comfortable with it, for example to contribute to the translations.

[comradekingu]

Sorry about that. What I meant to say is that AGPL covers more people, since it tries to always cover everyone, by closing the network loophole in the GPLv3 license. There are plenty of AGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses alike.
If you set it to GPLv3 now, you can set it to AGPLv3 later if you see network distribution as distribution. :)

[michelesalvador]

Well, if I can set it to AGPLv3 later, there's no doubt I choose GPLv3 right now.
Thank you Allan!

[IzzySoft]

@michelesalvador if you mean the "or later", you must explicitly express it (e.g. with the corresponding clause in the Readme). As it's currently put, it seems like "GPL-3.0-only" unless one discovers this issue. Example phrasings from other projects (usually put under a "Lincense" or "Licensing" sub-header):

• This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version (GPL-3.0-or-later).
• is distributed under the GPL-3.0 license (or any later version, at your option).
• This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

(last item is the "full variant"). Can you please confirm you meant "or later" – and if so, add that information to the Readme?

[michelesalvador]

Thank you for pointing it out.
I added to the Readme the "full variant" under a "License" sub-header, with the "or later" specification.
This will appear in the next commit.

[IzzySoft]

Thanks @michelesalvador – don't forget to push that commit 😆 Looking for it I scrutinized the Readme, found the translation lin (added to my metadata) but not the license – then saw the file is 17 days old. Doesn't match the timing 😉