hargata/lubelog

License Issues

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Maxqia commented

Hello
I find your project interesting and useful, but while looking through it I noticed that the license has some ambiguity and I feel like it could be improved to be more clear legally for both contributors and users.
First of all, there's a bug with your license.
Licensing under the "MIT License for individual and personal use" license has a loophole as any individual or personal user could just license their copy to anyone that wants to use it for commercial use as is allowed in the MIT license.
Second of all, it seems like one of the goals for your project is to be open source, but noncommercial restricted licenses don't qualify as open source according to the Open Source Initiative.
I would also like it if it was a more standardized license, noncommercial or not.
Contributions also currently have a licensing issue with your current dual licensing plan. As per GitHub's TOS section D.6, all contributions on GitHub are licensed under the project's at-the-time license as you don't have a separate contributor license agreement. The contributor retains their copyright in this circumstance, and as your project's license only allows for noncommercial use, this would mean that you are not allowed to relicense or include any contributions for commercial use. Some of the solutions I can think of are to split the project into open source and commercial, go fully open source, or keep the dual licensing model and require all contributors to transfer their copyright to you. You would also need to contact previous contributors under that license and get them to agree to what you choose or remove their contributions from your project to allow you to relicense it for commercial use.
I hope bringing this issue to light with you can help clear the path legally for anyone who wants to contribute to or use this project.
Thanks for your time,
Max

hargata commented

Thanks for reaching out, but there are no plans of updating the licensing terms anytime soon.

  1. The last license change was made on January 14th, 2024 which covers most if not all of the external contributions.
  2. All external contributions are aimed towards GitHub Actions, if it does come to removing those contributions it wouldn't be too difficult but for now there is no need to do so.
  3. If there are going to be updates to the license in the future, we're leaning towards adding addendums such as common clause to the license or maybe make it source-available.

For now, I think the licensing terms are pretty clear:

  1. If you're a personal user, LubeLogger is free to be use, modify, re-sell, etc. All clauses in MIT applies to you.
  2. If you're a commercial user incorporating LubeLogger in your operations, you should contribute monetarily via the Patreon subscription. Perhaps what I need to do here is expand on when corporate users have the right to modify / re-distribute the software. I can add that in the near future.

As for the legal loopholes of the licensing terms, personally, I am of the opinion that if someone think it's worth paying for, they'll pay for it; likewise, if they're adamant on jumping through the legal loopholes, that's on them.