Switch to AGPL to prevent nonfree forks from appearing
Secret-chest opened this issue · comments
Gandi IDE is an example.
The editor is already GPL, hence they did not use anything from our editor (except an old non-GPL version of -paint). AGPL would not change anything there. The things involved in project running itself are not GPL because that would make packaging non-GPL projects using the packager impossible.
Do you have a reason why you think AGPL would be preferable over GPL for the editor?
Then you can change the compiler to LGPL, which allows linking with other licences but forbids relicensing the code itself.
With GPL you can host a program on your public server and keep it nonfree because it is not sharing. With AGPL hosting is sharing.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic
I think I used to think that statically-linked-LGPL (what the packager would do) was effectively GPL but that seems to not be the case
I really don't see how the AGPL would matter for scratch-gui and friends but it can be looked at
If we switch to AGPL then we would also want eg. Scratch Addons to do the same, otherwise it might be a bit harder to send patches back upstream there
vm, render, packager, some extensions are now LGPL-3.0 moving forward
gui, addons, blocks, paint, desktop were already GPL-3.0
some very small libraries and parts of scratch that we've made only small changes to are still permissive as it is not worth the trouble and a lot of those have a lot of replacements already
backend stuff remains permissive as most of that is a disaster anyways and there's very simple replacements for all of that already