What should we do about license violations in apps that rely on work of Lemmy contributors?
What should we do about license violations in apps that rely on work of Lemmy contributors?
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.
Update: wefwef now includes the AGPL license in the repo. Thank you to the Lemmy user who reported it to the author and to the author for quickly resolving the issue :)
Looks like you are correct, these projects are required to be AGPL: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2684/monetizing-and-licensing-with-agpl-libraries
When your program uses an AGPL library, then your whole program must be licensed under the AGPL.
I would simply create an issue in the relevant repositories and let them know.
After reviewing this, I’ve updated the license for Memmy. Frankly had no idea, good idea to let people know like you said and just kindly inform them through GitHub or otherwise.
File an issue in their repos, sometimes people (understandably) do not understand licencing very well — or it might be they were granted an exception.
If that fails you can contact the library author and the repositories who host the code.