Jordan SisselWow there’s a lot of weird conflicting information about AGPL3 compatibility with other licenses and everyone seems to have their own ideas for what “convey” and “covered work” really means in some of these licenses.
I can’t find it now but yesterday I found a website with a promising matrix of license compatibilities except it also marked AGPL3 as incompatible with itself so I dunno
for context, I’m considering AGPL3 for future libxdo replacement/upgrade but trying to figure out the blast radius of such a thing is … difficult. I kinda don’t want to blow a grand on a lawyer just to not learn anything 🫠
Business is weird and hard.
Business is weird and hard.
R Tyler Croy 🦀@whack Why is license compatibility so important? If you like AGPL-3, just go for it
@rtyler ins and outs, I suppose. Context is that libxdo (used by xdotool, etc) is written in C and is currently BSD3clause licensed. I'm basically having to start from scratch to add Wayland support, so it's a good time to explore a license change.
Trying to figure out if any of my own dependencies in this new code are incompatible with being compiled-in or linked-with an AGPL3 program. For open source projects which depend on libxdo, I'm trying to figure out what (if any) conflicts this change may create so that I can decide whether those conflicts are worth it, or if I want to grant an exceptions, etc.
Example: Deskflow is GPL-2 and has an exception to allow linking with OpenSSL (OpenSSL's older licenses are reported to be incompatible with GPL-2).
Luke Kanies@whack @rtyler license choice is super important for libraries, especially. Lots of projects won’t choose a copy left library.
At puppet we switched from gpl to Apache because too many companies just wouldn’t touch a gpl project, because their lawyers could not guarantee the license would not spread to other projects of theirs.
There is no case law on any of this, so the lawyers all go very conservative in their analyses.
@lkanies @whack oh I certainly understand that corporate lawyers have feels about GPL. But when building something because ya want to build it, then I wouldn't take any lawyers opinion into consideration.
Outside of corporate baloney, I think copyleft feels only really comes into play when trying to get something into BSD userlands
Jeremy Grosser@whack I'd advise against it, because then every conversation about your project has to start with a treatise on licensing. It gets tiring.