Change licence to AGPLv3 and update donations text

[philipbelesky]

As discussed, this shifts Tabbycat to using a proper OSI licence. This is incompatible with our previous approach of requiring donations for profit/fundraising use, so I have updated the docs. I've also added a note about the possibility of dual-licensing for people who would like to avoid the gpl terms.

Happy to discuss here or over email; I just wanted to use the PR to ensure we are all onboard before merging.

[tienne-B]

I'm very open (enthusiastic even) to this change (and my commits may be re-licensed) for the GPLv3.

However, I am a bit skeptical about the relicensing for "proprietary" development. It goes against the "copyleft" aspect of GPLv3 (which is the GPLs "selling point"). Were there any hypothetical scenarios in which such a right is given?

[philipbelesky]

The dual license might end up being wholly hypothetical in practice, but the thinking was that it provides a means for companies/institutions to pay or be granted the right to be able to modify Tabbycat privately. From my understanding this is not a super unusual model, although there is some debate as to whether it is a 'true' open-source business model.

In our case, if the proprietary changes were very beneficial to the broader project we could still reserve the right not to grant a proprietary licence. If the changes were not — say adding an importer that interfaces with a custom registration system, or adding a highly-tailored draw rule that would be of no use to others — it provides a means to allow those changes to happen without publicly disclosing the details.

Those scenarios are probably unlikely, but the thinking was to preserve the option for a limited form of proprietary license incase of future unforeseen circumstances where it is somehow desirable.

[tienne-B]

I don't really agree with these scenarios. The first case is to my mind the only reason why such rights would be asked for, and we are in agreement that it would not be allowed. The second case is for trivial modifications, for which I doubt people seeking "approval." Further, the GPL allows for the private modification and use of software (just not the non-open distribution). As such versions would not be distributed to its users (due to it being a web-application), asking for permission doesn't really apply. If they were to share their version for another tab team, they should be required to disclose source to the other tab team (but not necessarily upstream)

[philipbelesky]

Hmm, on that note, how would you / @czlee feel about the AGPL over the GPL? Given we are primarily a web application, rather than a library, the private modification + deployment scenario encapsulates the entire use case of the code base. The only case where distribution would be a pain is in the case of a major public fork, but the more likely scenario of a 'private' fork deployed as needed by a company/institution is also one where it would be valuable to have the source disclosed.

[czlee]

I moved the substantive discussion to an email thread.

One thing on documentation: To be consistent, I'd like us to maintain British spelling in all our documentation, please? The only exception would be LICENSE.md, because we obviously can't modify the GPL text.

[tienne-B]

Might want to rebase this...

After discussion, we've moved towards using the AGPL with an opening for dual-licensing.

[czlee]

pedantic grammar stuff

[tienne-B]

Any reason why we're re-adding the Donations page? Would just be simpler to keep redirecting to the OC page as we were doing.

[czlee]

I squashed it to one commit (slightly forcefully—I used a soft reset to avoid dealing with intermediate conflicts).