This repo is in desperate need of a license. about zeppelin HOT 12 CLOSED

Yes, that's probably a good idea. I may have closed it a bit too hastily.

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I brought up the issue with the developers about a month and a half ago. The lack of a license—implying all rights reserved—was intentional. Dragory permits self-hosting once you don't publicize your instance, so I assume the "Negotiate a private license" rule would apply.
Though I think it'd still be more reassuring and safer to have an official, publicly documented license on the repository which addresses liability and usage rights, especially for potential contributors interested in improving Zeppelin.

To be safe from any kind of copyright issue, you would need to come to an agreement with every single contributor. In my humble, not legal advice opinion, the best you can do is add a license that contributors would agree with and hope they don't do anything/just accept it.

Thankfully there aren't too many contributors, and most of the existing ones are currently involved in Zeppelin's development.

from zeppelin.

The lack of a license—implying all rights reserved—was intentional.

The core issue is that this breaks down once thers more than once person working on the repo.

Another big issue is also the fact that there is no warranty waiver, currently dragory might be held responsible for damages caused by this bot. At least a warranty waiver should be added.

from zeppelin.

Thank you for the heads up! I'll look into adding an "all rights reserved"/proprietary license at some point in the near future after discussing it with current contributors, as well as a contributor agreement with a clause about the right to use the code.

As a side note, in regards to the warranty waiver, I don't see how there would be an implied warranty if there's no license to begin with (meaning you're not allowed to use the code in the first place). Do you have a source/reference for that?

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I'll look into adding an "all rights reserved"/proprietary license at some point in the near future

If you do add a fully proprietary license, what was the point of releasing on GitHub? Do you want others to be able to use this code, or do you just want to profit from contributions that others make?

I don't see how there would be an implied warranty if there's no license to begin with

This depends on interpretation of GitHub's TOS, as that does give GitHub and its users some right to any code in a public repository. It's very unlikely, but since you did release the code on GitHub and also added a readme explaining how to run it, one could argue this is implicitly giving people permission to run it.

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The code is available on GitHub primarily for auditability; the project is not open source, but source-available. I do also want to allow self-hosting, but not publicly hosting for others (i.e. offering a competitor using the same codebase). I'm not sure there's an appropriate existing license with those terms, so I'll need to look into it further.

do you just want to profit from contributions that others make?

I don't currently profit from Zeppelin. All Patreon contributions go directly to server costs and other related costs. However, if we extend the definition of "profit" to also include "being able to offer the bot as a service", then yes, that is how contributions are currently handled.

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You will likely have to write your own terms for the "self-hosting is allowed if it's not public" part, as all licences i know of make the distinction between commercial and non-commercial use.

Can i recommend reopening the issue until a license or contributor agreement is added, as to make it more visible to people stumbling across this repo?

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i've added a tl;dr at the top for people reading this, hope thats okay.

i assume your willingness to allow selfhosting this for private use means i can go ahead with dockerizing this for my personal use? im willing to contribute that once there is a contributor agreement, if you want.

from zeppelin.

Yeah, I believe you can. @Benricheson101 already has working Docker support on his fork though.

from zeppelin.

I do! I'd also be willing to PR that if it something that would be useful.

from zeppelin.

Looks like a license was added. Maybe time to close this issue?

from zeppelin.

seems like one was added 3 months ago, nice!

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