What software license should we use?

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard plenty against it, the concept of copyleft, and offensive things about RMS ever since my school days- and that wasn’t yesterday! :wink: This is just the first time I’ve heard the license itself described as such! But that debate is better had elsewhere.

I agree that another party keeping modifications to Codidact and not releasing those is less desirable than another party working to get improvements merged back in.

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Argument for the most restrictive option, at least for now:

Consider your usual open source project:
I experienced difficulties when trying to do [X]. I want to make it more easy for others to do [X].

Now take a step back and look at what we are doing with the Codidact project.
SO The Company’s behaviour has driven us to a point where creating a similar service ourselves, just so we don’t have to deal with them anymore, is a very attractive option.
Nobody said “SO The Company sucks so much that I want to create Yet Another Q&A Implementation.

The goal of this organization is to provide a superior Q&A service.
As in, we could even do that with a private repo. It’s just that a private repo does not give us any big advantage, while a public repo fits better with the spirit of collaboration and not-ignoring-the-community that we want.

That somebody can download it and host it themselves is just a side effect IMHO.

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Sorry if this has been broached already.
Shouldn’t there be a different license for the software underlying the codidact network and the contents (i.e. the actual Q&As)?
The first could then be GPL whereas the latter would have a more permissive license so users could avail of the contents without having to license the projects where they use under GPL, nor even making those open source at that?

That has been discussed, just not in detail on this forum, and yes that was pretty clear - user content will be licensed differently from the underlying software. The software license is critical right now as changing it after any code has been published in any public form (even before a production system is running) is complicated. The user content license doesn’t matter much during initial development.

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Got it, thanks @manassehkatz !

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This doesn’t appear to be resolved, and it is or will soon be a blocker. How do we move forward?

I haven’t read all the license descriptions in detail, nor have I voted. What I most care about is that anybody who makes changes to Codidact and either publishes that software or runs a service using those changes has to contribute it back to us. What license unambiguously does that? This can’t put us into roll-your-own territory, can it?

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That would be the AGPL. All other listed licenses allow running a service with changed code without contributing those changes back.

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Resolving this by executive decision: we’ll use AGPL v3 for the Core software. We don’t have to use it for other products or libraries we create along the way, necessarily, but Core will use it so we can make sure we get changes back.

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You might like to know that TopAnswers has also chosen AGPL v3 which may come in handy if we ever want to share any code :slight_smile:

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