What should we do about license violations in apps that rely on work of Lemmy contributors? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I found two apps that seem to be violating the AGPL license. They both use the AGPL-licensed lemmy-js-client library, which means the apps themselves should also use the same license (which is the whole purpose of Copyleft). But they aren't. I don't know if Lemmy developers and contributors are aware of this.

The apps:

https://github.com/ando818/lemmy-ui-svelte - Apache license

https://github.com/aeharding/wefwef - MIT license

What should we do about this as a community? I informed one of the app's developers about this and it doesn't seem like they care. I wonder if some of the proprietary apps that are being developed right now also rely on this library.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] thefool 10 points 1 year ago

I believe it's up to the license holder to enforce it.

So notifying the respective projects can't hurt, but if they refuse to comply, and the copyright owner of lemmy-js-client doesn't care, then the code is probably licensed incorrectly

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean if you really wanted to enforce it, anyone who contributed to Lemmy-js-client can submit a DMCA takedown. But that would be beyond silly, since most people are just trying to build cool things and don't want to enter a licensing drama.

Best course of action is to point out the license error and let downstream figure it out.

this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023

93 points (97.0% liked)

Open Source

29114 readers

193 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]