this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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This is probably illegal. I am not a lawyer, but when you have 114 contributors who provided their code under the terms of the GPL, you can’t just change your mind later. The GPL doesn’t work like that. You have to actually own the code as its copyright holder if you want to license it under a new license. Generally speaking, those other contributors retain copyright to their work, so unless you release your project under the GPL in perpetuity you would need to get the consent of all those contributors first. It’s not your code to license. You must obey the GPL that you agreed to when you included their work.
Any of your contributors can now turn around and assert that you are now distributing their GPL code in violation of the license. The GPL is quite clear that you need to respect the rights of the users to freely modify and redistribute derivative works. Because the GPL is viral, all you need to do is find the tiniest contribution that was made when the project was GPL to assert that all of the code must comply with the terms of the GPL and you can produce your derivative works as permitted by such a license. The legal risk of GPL contamination is very real and makes a more restrictive license practically unenforceable without a cleanroom rewriting of the project from scratch.
Also, Creative Commons licenses should never be applied to software as done here. These legal tools are designed for media, and the website itself indicates that the licenses are inappropriate because they don’t address software specific concerns like patents and development by multiple contributors.
Overall, this looks like a naïve attempt to prevent derivative works, but escaping the GPL is not so easy. The GPL was written to prevent you from doing this sort of thing.
ADDENDUM: Just in case the developer ever happens to find this comment, I want to say that I have a lot of compassion for the problems he is facing. I have maintained open source projects before, and watching your community get fragmented, your work disrespected, and failure to acknowledge that this is a hobby you’re doing in your free time weighs heavily upon you. I think this move is incorrect, but I acknowledge I’m not providing a viable alternative. I don’t know what the correct response should be.
Not to excuse the developer but I empathise with why they might have felt compelled to change the license.
One of the biggest pains for any open source project is distributions and packagers who package the software themselves yet make changes or configure in non-standard ways which leads to major overheads for upstream as everyone submits bug reports for bugs introduced down stream and have nothing to do with them.
I feel we, as a community, need to be more vocal about when a project has been modified from the original source for packaging or distribution (where those changes weren’t pushed upstream) to demand the project be renamed in that instance.
I feel for these small developers who do this in their spare time and find the community forcing more work on them and damaging their reputation without any fault of the developer but someone downstream who doesn’t care not want to support what they’ve packaged.
Perhaps there are other solutions? Before other projects decide to use awful licenses and infringe on rights just to try and tackle the problems created by downstream.
This developer offers flatpak and AppImage builds, both of which try to solve the problem of distributions making their own distribution-specific changes.
It’s not a perfect solution, but there are some packaging systems trying to move in the right direction.