Re: Building applications without AGPL restriction

[madmurphy]

Just to be precise, (A)GPL does not force people to license their contributions under (A)GPL, it only ask contributions to be licensed under a compatible license (and that includes BSD, MIT, etc.).

Independently of that, if you contribute to a project it is always good practice to stick to the project's original license, no matter what that is (and many projects actually require it). If instead you write code on your own that is only only linked against (A)GPL code (but it is not a direct contribution to the upstream stack), you are totally free to choose the compatible license that best suits you.

My personal opinion is that, indepdentently of GNUnet, people should never use anything different from a copyleft license. And among copyleft licenses AGPL is probably the best designed license.

If you want to license your C++ wrapper under BSD you can – GNUnet's license will never affect the license of your wrapper. However, as long as your wrapper is used in conjunction with GNUnet, the requirements of both licenses will apply, and that means that the requirements of the AGPL will prevail. But your wrapper will always be licensed under BSD and nothing will change that.

The question is then less legalese and more philosophical: why would you ever want to release code under a license that gives less rights to your non-programmer users and more rights to your programmer users?

My two cents

--madmurphy

On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 7:51 AM marty1885 <marty1885@protonmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I've been interested in GNUnet for quite a while now. Recently I got time to
learn the API and be able to build a C++ wrapper for some of the subsystems.
It's fun!

Now I want to build applications using GNUnet. As I understand, GNUnet is
licensed under AGPL thus my application also has to be AGPL. But it may not be
suitable for my use case.

For example I want to show GNUnet stats on my personal website. Or some REST
that exposes GNUnet metadata, FS proxy for download, DHT get/put, etc.. Which
enable others to have easy-ish access to GNUnet. But I don't want to force them
to also use AGPL. (Or even some security/commercial application in the future.)

Is it possible to let applications be licensed under BSD/MIT/LGPL (or even via
special clauses in GNUnet) without complicating the code?

I know this is a long shot. But no harm to ask.

Best Regards,

Martin