Re: Can we licence our Clojure (Eclipse Public License 1.0) project with the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE?

From: Nico Rikken <nico@nicorikken.eu>
To: libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
Cc: Aspasia Beneti <aspra@dyne.org>
Subject: Re: Can we licence our Clojure (Eclipse Public License 1.0) project with the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE?
Date: Wed, 24 May 2017 09:05:56 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1495609556.5745.1.camel@nicorikken.eu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <11FB4C65-FB77-47F2-80D4-6A14A43C6121@dyne.org>

Hi Aspasia,

Great to see you reaching out on this topic. Perhaps you can write on
your findings, for all Clojure developers to take note? As you know I'm
not developing under a free software license at work, but I did look
into this topic as a Clojure developer. I specifically looked into the
GPL, not even the AGPL. Let me break down your question to the
different topics:

JVM
It seems the GNU Classpath was used at the start of OpenJDK, but later
all was upstreamed to the OpenJDK project.[1] OpenJDK is licensed under
the GPL, but with a linking exception for the classpath.[2] So I don't
think the JVM blocks AGPL adoption.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#IcedTea_and_inclusion_in_soft
ware_distributions
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK

Libraries
Going through your dependency list [0], I notice different licenses:
EPL 1.0:  Clojure, Timbre, Liberator, Autoclave, most others
MIT:  Ring, Cheshire
EPL 1.0 & Apache 2.0:  Monger
AGPL 3.0:  FXC (Dyne.org project)
(I didn't look them all up)
[0] https://github.com/PIENews/freecoin/blob/master/project.clj

If I understand correctly, the linked libraries do effect the license
compatibility, so the EPL/AGPL conflict is a real issue here.

Macros
As a lisp, Clojure uses macro's to modify the code at runtime. Then
again, the macro's are code as well, so they'll also have a license
attached to them. Maybe issues arise when the code is AGPL, but the
macro modifying the code is EPL. To be fair, you shouldn't be using as
much macro's anyway ;)

The long game would be to have a AGPL-friendly lisp platform, with
similar semantics to Clojure. This could be another reason why you'd
want to avoid copyleft or dual-license any libraries you put out on
Clojure.
Projects I have looked into:
- GNU Guile: Distant from Clojure, but a GNU project.
- hylang.org: MIT-licensed Clojure-inspired lisp based on Python, by
modifying the Abstract Syntax Tree.
- Pixie: Clojure-inspired lisp based on RPython with C-interop.

I hope others can chip in to share their view, as there are probably
others asking a similar question.

Kind regards,
Nico Rikken (NL, FSFE)