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

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

[Aspasia Beneti]

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Dear all,

I am pretty new with all the software licensing so please excuse my ignorance.

We are on the making of an open source software written in Clojure namely https://github.com/PIENews/freecoin. We want to ensure that it is used openly by the community and will be secured from been used for commercial purposes. We have licensed our software under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 19 November 2007. However it was brought to our attention that GPL and EPL are incompatible (are they?) and Clojure is licensed with EPL. I think it gets a bit more complicated cause Clojure is a lisp which runs on the JVM. Clojure has macros that will expand code if not precompiled and I also noticed that the JVM brings other matters on the table like https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html

Do you have any advice on what is the best way to go in our case? And what kind of risks we could run into?

Thanks a lot!

Aspasia Beneti aka aspra
Dyne.org Think & Do tank
Lead software developer of the Freecoin toolkit
GPG: 204F 8156 8C0E 0600 E17C  001B 58D2 05D8 7EE4 D9F4










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

[Jason Self]

Aspasia Beneti <aspra@dyne.org> wrote ..
> and will be secured from been used for commercial purposes

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this but I wanted to point
out a part from the Free Software Definition [0]:

"'Free software' does not mean 'noncommercial'. A free program must be
available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial
distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer
unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have
paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained
copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you
always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell
copies."

I recommend reading the entire Free Software Definition along with
Selling Free Software [1].

Depending on what exactly you mean by the programing being "secured"
from commercial use, it may mean that it doesn't qualify as free
software to begin with.

On the other hand, if you mean 'commercial' as a synonym for
'non-free' or 'proprietary' then I'd like to point you to [2].

> However it was brought to our attention that GPL and EPL are 
> incompatible (are they?)

Yes, the FSF has it in its list of GPL-Incompatible Free Software
Licenses [3]. Plus, there's also [4].

> Do you have any advice on what is the best way to go in our case?

There was a discussion on a new version of the EPL [5] but it seems to
have stalled. Regardless it would be good to help raise GPL
compatibility as something to be addressed in the next version of the EPL.

Until/less that happens perhaps some sort of exception is appropriate?
It may be best to contact licensing@fsf.org for help with such a thing
because it can be hard to get them "just right."

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Commercial
[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EPL
[4] https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#GPLCOMPATIBLE
[5]
https://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/community-review-of-the-eclipse-public-license/

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

[Nico Rikken]

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)

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

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

Personally, I suggest using GNU Guile.

There are various projects that make use of it. I'll try to give
examples of projects which might be related to your project, but I don't
know them in detail, so I'll not describe them, here goes the list
(taken from [[https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/]]): GNU
Artanis, Guile Config, Guile JSON, Guile DBI, Guile DBD SQLite3, Guile
GDBM FFI, GNU Guile GnuTLS, Graphviz, Guile Cairo.

Dates, times, and environment variables can be managed directly in GNU
Guile, if I'm not mistaken.

There is also GNU Taler ([[https://www.gnu.org/software/taler/]]), which
thankfully isn't a new currency on it's own, but is a way for people to
transfer values in any currency --- be it for products bought or simply
for transfering to one person to another ---, as such, GNU Taler will
work for Brazilian Reals, US Dolars, BitCoin, or any other
currency. However, I don't know if GNU Taler uses GNU Guile.

Anyways, Guile is very extensible, and tries to keep strings and things
as user-readable as possible. :)

-- 
- [[https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno]]
- Palestrante e consultor sobre /software/ livre (não confundir com
  gratis).
- "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre, por isso não uso. Iguais a ele prefiro
  GNU Ring, ou Tox. Quer outras formas de contato? Adicione o vCard
  que está no endereço acima aos teus contatos.
- Pretende me enviar arquivos .doc, .ppt, .cdr, ou .mp3? OK, eu
  aceito, mas não repasso. Entrego apenas em formatos favoráveis ao
  /software/ livre. Favor entrar em contato em caso de dúvida.

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

[Aspasia Beneti]

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Aspasia Beneti <address@hidden> wrote ..
> and will be secured from been used for commercial purposes

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this but I wanted to point
out a part from the Free Software Definition [0]:

"'Free software' does not mean 'noncommercial'. A free program must be
available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial
distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer
unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have
paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained
copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you
always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell
copies."

I recommend reading the entire Free Software Definition along with
Selling Free Software [1].

Depending on what exactly you mean by the programing being "secured"
from commercial use, it may mean that it doesn't qualify as free
software to begin with.

On the other hand, if you mean 'commercial' as a synonym for
'non-free' or 'proprietary' then I'd like to point you to [2].
>> I meant proprietary and/or non-free. Excuse my lack of terminology and thanks for the links.

> However it was brought to our attention that GPL and EPL are
> incompatible (are they?)

Yes, the FSF has it in its list of GPL-Incompatible Free Software
Licenses [3]. Plus, there's also [4].
>> Yes I saw this. However I have seen Clojure projects licensed under AGPL and I have seen discussions over exceptions etc. My understanding so far is that it is a bit of a grey area in practice.

> Do you have any advice on what is the best way to go in our case?

There was a discussion on a new version of the EPL [5] but it seems to
have stalled. Regardless it would be good to help raise GPL
compatibility as something to be addressed in the next version of the EPL.

Until/less that happens perhaps some sort of exception is appropriate?
It may be best to contact address@hidden for help with such a thing
because it can be hard to get them "just right.”
>> Not sure who you mean I should contact. We are planning to get some legal advice at the end but I would like to understand how the community sees it before.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Commercial
[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EPL
[4] https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#GPLCOMPATIBLE
[5]
https://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/community-review-of-the-eclipse-public-license/

Aspasia Beneti aka aspra
Dyne.org Think & Do tank
Lead software developer of the Freecoin toolkit
GPG: 204F 8156 8C0E 0600 E17C  001B 58D2 05D8 7EE4 D9F4










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

[Jason Self]

Aspasia Beneti said:
> Not sure who you mean I should contact.

It was a two-fold suggestion.

The first was to participate in the discussion of the next version of the 
EPL so as to raise GPL compatibility as a thing that should be addressed in 
that new version. There is a mailing list linked to from [0] for the 
purposes of discussing the next version of the EPL.

The second was to contact the FSF's Licensing & Compliance Lab via 
licensing@fsf.org for help in seeing if an exception would be appropriate 
and to see if they could help draft one.

Hopefully between these two it'd help solve not just your particular 
problem but also everyone else's by trying to get a newer version of the 
EPL that's GPL-compatible.

[0] https://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/community-review-of-the-
eclipse-public-license/

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

[Aspasia Beneti]

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Aspasia Beneti said:
> Not sure who you mean I should contact.

It was a two-fold suggestion.

The first was to participate in the discussion of the next version of the
EPL so as to raise GPL compatibility as a thing that should be addressed in
that new version. There is a mailing list linked to from [0] for the
purposes of discussing the next version of the EPL.

The second was to contact the FSF's Licensing & Compliance Lab via
address@hidden for help in seeing if an exception would be appropriate
and to see if they could help draft one.

Hopefully between these two it'd help solve not just your particular
problem but also everyone else's by trying to get a newer version of the
EPL that's GPL-compatible.

[0] https://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/community-review-of-the-
eclipse-public-license/

>> Thanks for the advice, I have done both and waiting for more information. I will keep this thread updated when I have some news.











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