AGPLv3 License

[raymeskhoury]

Hi there,

Firstly, this is a great piece of software. Thank you. I have already started looking at using this software in my project and will likely make some upstream contributions for bug fixes in the coming weeks.

Regarding the license - I am wondering whether an AGPLv3 license is your preference or whether it was only used due to the license of headunit-reloaded being AGPLv3? I noticed that the author of headunit-reloaded mentioned the possibility of relicensing the original code in their LICENSE file. If we were able to contact them and they were willing to change their license, would you also be willing to change yours? Or do you like having it be AGPLv3?

Cheers

[tsabaia]

I don't understand much about this, but what's the benefit of changing the license?

[andreknieriem]

And you are mixing the projects :)

Headunit is from Mike Reidis, who reverse engeneered all Android Auto Protocol and built an very early app, which works on android 4. He died, but his source code is still public visible and linked in the Readme.

After Mike died, Emil "reloaded" Headunit and created Headunit Reloaded with more features and versions and made it a paid closed source version with the later WiFi Launcher.

After 2 years and non working on my headunit I found the original Code from mike and "revived" it and call it Headunit revived. Because Headunit Reloaded is closed source, this two projects have nothing in common except of course the same source project.

I am not a lawyer but I think, I need the same licence as mike does. So that is why it has this license.

[raymeskhoury]

Thank you for the history lesson (quite a sad one actually). That is indeed a complex situation and it does seem virtually impossible to change the license.

I don't understand much about this, but what's the benefit of changing the license?

Lots of material online about this but in a nutshell... AGPLv3 requires that any derived/altered works also have their source code made available. It means that anyone can take the headunit revived code (or any future project that uses headunit revived), package it up and offer it at a price of their choosing (or free). It also means the work cannot be used in any publicly available closed-source projects.

Thanks again for your response @andreknieriem

[raymeskhoury]

@andreknieriem while we are on this topic - are you able to clarify the licensing on wireless-helper? There is no LICENSE file listed in the project.

Thank you

[andreknieriem]

Oh you are right. What do you think might be the best licence?

[andreknieriem]

And Emils Code isn't public too. So I think it is changeable. What do you think is the best for Hurev?

[raymeskhoury]

I am also not a lawyer but technically I do think it is difficult to change the license given that the original author passed away. You would need to try to get in touch with Mike's estate (i.e. whoever the copyright of the original work passed to after his death) and obtain permission to change the license. I suspect that would be hard.

Again, I am not a lawyer but just because Emil's code wasn't made available to his users doesn't mean that was done legally. GPLv3 is extremely strict and it's designed to be very hard to get around it. My reading is the same as yours - i.e. that AGPLv3 is necessary.

From what I can see the only real ways to change the license now would be:

1. Rewrite the code so it doesn't depend on any of the original headunit code. I suspect this would be quite a lot of work at this point. It's also difficult to do as technically it should be done by someone who has not studied the original code at all in order to avoid copyright concerns.
2. Violate copyright and change the license in the hope that the original authors and their estate would not care and/or take any action. This is not legal and I'm not suggesting this.
3. As mentioned above, get the original author's estate to change the license which would allow usage by non GPL code.

If it was me, I would just stick with AGPLv3 for now given the complexities unless you are strongly motivated otherwise.

What do you think is the best for Hurev?

It really depends on what your goals are for the project. If you want to ensure the open source freedom of the project now and in to the future, GPL is a good choice. However, it does limit commercialization potential. That's not always a bad thing. Other licenses like Apache and BSD are more permissive and generally allow others to use the code in almost any way they please without making their derived source code available.

As for wireless-helper, I haven't looked closely at the code, but you may have a little more flexibility in the licensing if you wrote that from scratch. If wireless-helper is considered a totally separate work that is not a part of the original code then this would be ok. The two apps could not communicate using any intricate, non-public APIs. If you did go this path, you would probably want to document how they interact so that anyone could develop a replacement wireless helper, etc. in order to safely comply with the GPL requirements.

I'll say it again for the record, I am not a lawyer and you're just getting my knowledge/experience as a software developer for 2 decades :)

[andreknieriem]

Thank you for your long post. His Wife sometimes answers on the old github code, so may be a chance to write her. But for now I leave it.

Wireless Helper is completely self written and I can set the licence I want. My old simplelightbox JS plugin has MIT and I think this or Apache would do it for me.

[raymeskhoury]

If you do think you may want to change it in the future, I would suggest trying to obtain written permission now (and ideally asking her to make a commit updating the license of the original github). You may want to mention that he considered changing the license in the LICENSE file prior to the project being orphaned. As time goes on, responses for old projects tend to become less and less likely.

Furthermore, bear in mind that technically external contributions to this github have their copyright retained by the original authors by default and are licensed under GPLv3. It is difficult to explain, however what this means is that if you want to change the license in future you need permission from all the contributors (or to rewrite thir code). Currently there are only a relatively small number of contributors and this would not be hard but as more contributors come on board this becomes more difficult.

One way to solve this is by having new contributors sign an agreement (CLA) that assigns the rights to you to change the license in the future.

Basically, as time goes on and an open source project grows it becomes harder and harder to change the license away from GPL so just bear this in mind. It would be simplest to change it sooner and not need a CLA.

Either way, you are in the best place to judge the decision and I will leave it to you.

Cheers,
Ray