Clarification on project's license and open source state · standardnotes/forum · Discussion #3196
github.com
Hello 👋, Just came across this project, and saw the app being advertised as open source, like on this page where it's advertised as "100% open source". Looking at the app repo though, the licensing...

Hello everyone,

I’ve been using Standard Notes on the recommendation of Privacy Guides since the beginning of this year, I believe, and it has truly been a fantastic experience. It serves my purpose perfectly, is truly cross-platform, open source, and lightweight. It was a real find, and I couldn’t be happier to have it installed. However, it seems that they are planning to change the licensing to one that restricts companies from abusing their code (which makes sense), but I wanted to know if this goes against the guidelines in terms of considering it recommendable.

I don’t really understand licenses, so correct me if I’m wrong, but with this change if the project becomes private, a fork couldn’t be created for all users who want to continue having the software format but not the backend… Is that correct?

Thanks

  • @[email protected]English
    29•9 months ago

    In terms of privacy, nothing would change, it’s still the same as ever so I think the recommendation can absolutely stay up, even proprietary apps are suggested on Privacy Guides.
    In terms of software freedom, this is a terrible change and I really dislike projects moving to source-available models, in this case, as the other commenters said there, I don’t even think it’s legal, unless every contributor has signed a CLA in the past.
    I feel for not wanting to be explioted by corporate, but they could have gone the dual licensing path and instead chose to restrict everyone’s freedom, even us users. Now that doesn’t mean forks can’t be made I believe, it’s just that anyone who does that, won’t ever be able to sell the service which could be unsustainable since they made the server CC-BY-NC-SA, that’s a big turn off for those who want to host that

        • NoStepOnPythonEnglish
          1•9 months ago

          Even if what they’re doing is legal, it still has a negative impact on the privacy community. F-droid no longer providing Standard Notes builds is going to cut off people from using this app’s updates going forward. It may end up being relegated to the IzzyOnDroid repo, but still not everyone uses that.

          At least Signal provides a method outside of F-droid for automatic updates.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•9 months ago

        Luckily for me, I saw this coming years ago and avoided this app.

        I did too, but because I’m broke lol.

        You can have zero expectations of privacy with closed source apps

        That is true, but for the front end applications, if that is open source and has sound encryption then the server could even be proprietary, it won’t be able to break the encryption, so your data would be safe, maybe not so much for some metadata though. In this case the apps were changed to be all AGPL as I understand, so that should be ok.

        Agree with all the rest, don’t like the maintainer’s attitude.

        Edit: I was wrong, even the app is source available now (CC Noncommercial), not exactly good, but better than proprietary I guess

    • @[email protected]English
      2•9 months ago

      they made the server CC-BY-NC-SA

      I just checked their Github and the app is CC-BY-NC-SA but the server is still GPL v3.

  • @thesmokingmanEnglish
    12•9 months ago

    If they push AGPL, then the code is still open, it’s just explicitly copyleft. Any GPL license imposes serious restrictions on what the end user can do. AGPL further restricts what end users can do. Copyleft is similar but different from open source. Basically all they’re doing is leaving the code open to view but preventing anyone from money off of it.

    Honestly for people like yourself this is exactly what you want for privacy software. Copyleft with commercial restrictions is basically the whole FSF vibe. This is much ado about nothing; previously the code was unlicensed on GitHub which is much more restrictive than AGPL.

    • Solar BearEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      If they push AGPL, then the code is still open

      My understanding is that they are only applying AGPL to the current version and going forward all versions will no longer be AGPL. However if they have accepted contributions that were not covered by an agreement to transfer copyright, this is illegal without obtaining explicit approval from all contributors.

      Copyleft with commercial restrictions is basically the whole FSF vibe.

      No, I don’t think you understand the free software movement at all. It has never been strictly noncommercial. Open source has never been a vow of poverty.

      Honestly for people like yourself this is exactly what you want for privacy software. […] This is much ado about nothing; previously the code was unlicensed on GitHub which is much more restrictive than AGPL.

      BY-NC-SA is considered non-free by everybody, including the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and even Creative Commons themselves.

      https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/freeworks/
      https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
      https://opensource.org/licenses/

      Furthermore, Creative Commons strongly warns against using these licenses for software for this very reason.

      https://creativecommons.org/faq/#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F

      “Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?”

      "We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative. "

      “Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.”

      • @thesmokingmanEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        ~I’m not sure why you brought up the CC license; unlicensed GitHub repos do not use that and, generally, it’s understood that CC licenses cover documentation only for the reasons you cited.~

        I think you and I fundamentally disagree about the point of FSF. Open source is not a vow of poverty, you’re right; copyleft damn near is. Open source is an umbrella that covers both open and copyleft licenses. For the average business that wants to keep closed source code, copyleft modules are poison. I’ve handled the compliance process for both SMB and enterprise companies. Unless you’re someone like Red Hat, copyleft is basically noncommercial. AGPL, SSPL, and BSL are joke licenses that also present the exact same problems as copyleft albeit much worse for businesses to pick up. If you couldn’t tell, I don’t like copyleft code because I don’t think it’s okay to place restrictions on code beyond the basic litigation coverage things like the Apache 2.0 offer.

        ~As for what SN is doing, my read of that was the code would be AGPL moving forward. My understanding is that you don’t need contributor approval to apply it (depending on the original license; in the case of the unlicensed code they have full power) but you do need contributor approval to remove it. If you’re right and they’re going to drop it after applying it, they’re opening themselves up to litigation should someone choose to pursue it.~

        Edit: just looked at the repo; they replaced the root AGPL with the CC license instead of, say, linking the CC license for docs and leaving AGPL in place. The individual packages don’t have licenses and the root code (eg scripts) don’t have one either. Ignore what I said about SN; they did everything wrong and it’s stressful to look at.

  • NoStepOnPythonEnglish
    12•9 months ago

    Thank you for raising this. My subscription was up for renewal next year, and I think I’ll look elsewhere now.

    The only reason I chose to support S Notes in the first place is they were the best designed FOSS notes app at the time, and 4 years later they have plenty of competition in that space fortunately. Honestly I expected better from them, they say all the right things but I guess the greed just got too much for them.

  • @[email protected]English
    4•9 months ago

    For anyone looking for an alternative, I really like Trilium so far. It’s completely open source and the main dev and community seem great.

    The performance is way better for me than SN. SN couldn’t handle a large number of notes very well when I tested it last.

    The only downside imo is there’s no real mobile client, but the mobile web interface is still pretty good and usable.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•9 months ago

        It’s been a few years but Joplin always felt clunky to me, and sync was extremely slow. I’m not sure if it even had plugin support when I tried it last.

        Trilium does actually have plugin support it’s just not as discoverable imo. You can create backend scripts and also frontend scripts that could act like a new editor.

        There aren’t a ton of public ones, but check out https://github.com/Nriver/awesome-trilium for a few examples if you’re interested.