Forgejo is changing its license to a Copyleft license. This blog post will try to bring clarity about the impact to you, explain the motivation behind this change and answer some questions you might have.

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Developers who choose to publish their work under a copyleft license are excluded from participating in software that is published under a permissive license. That is at the opposite of the core values of the Forgejo project and in June 2023 it was decided to also accept copylefted contributions. A year later, in August 2024, the first pull request to take advantage of this opportunity was proposed and merged.

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Forgejo versions starting from v9.0 are now released under the GPL v3+ and earlier Forgejo versions, including v8.0 and v7.0 patch releases remain under the MIT license.

  •  Norah - She/They   ( @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
    20•27 days ago

    Except both of the projects you just linked too have CLAs, which they updated on switching to AGPLv3. Both use them as a way to offer dual-licensing, so they can charge companies for an AGPL-exception by selling them a proprietary-licensed version, which then supports the FOSS-development. They both were also only able to change to AGPL because of already existing CLAs. At least in Element’s case though, they created a two-way commitment in their CLA:

    Now, CLAs come in all shapes and sizes: some good and some bad. It’s critical to understand that our reason for requiring one here is to give us the right to sell AGPL exceptions: not to “do a Hashicorp” and switch to a non-FOSS licence in future. We’ve made this clear in the wording of the CLA (using a similar approach to Signal’s CLA) by committing to distributing contributions as FOSS under an OSI-approved licence – many thanks to those who gave feedback on the original announcement to suggest this. You can find the final CLA wording here, derived from the well-respected Apache Software Foundation CLA.

    Here’s the specific text from the CLA:

    Element shall be entitled to make Your Contribution available under Element’s proprietary software licence, provided that Element shall also make Your Contribution available under the terms of an OSl-approved open-source license.

    I personally consider that a fairly reasonable term. Especially because they specified an OSI-approved license. Element are always going to be bound to that now. This is like the copyleft of contributor license agreements.

    •  whou   ( @whou@lemmy.ml ) 
      2•24 days ago

      whoa! thanks a lot! that’s my mistake.

      thanks for the awesome info, I should’ve at least check the repo of the individual projects first (only did so with Forgejo).

      I totally agree with you, and do think that it is possible to have positive and harmless CLAs. though I do think we should always take a step back and not assume that a project’s CLA will be in favor of our copyright, with the case being more the exception than the norm, unfortunately.

      in the end, I will always be happy that a copyright holder wants to be able to reliably make money with copyleft software, but I can never really face a CLA without at least initial hostility anymore. you may say I have prejudice against CLAs lol