Canonical changes the license of LXD to AGPL

wiki_me@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 71 points –
LXD 5.20 has been released
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Yes but I don't know what you don't understand. One-directional flow of FLOSS licenses?

Projects which choose BSD/Apache type licences do so fully in the knowledge that their code may be incorporated into projects with different licences. That's literally the point: it's considered a feature of the licence. These projects are explicitly OK with their code going proprietary, for example. If they weren't OK with it, they'd use a GPL-type copyleft licence instead, as that's conversely the literal point of those licences.

Being mad about your Apache code being incorporated into a GPL project would make no sense, and certainly wouldn't garner any sympathy from most people in the FOSS community.

Yes and by not continuing that licensing but instead adopting AGPL+CLA Canonical create their usual one way street.

Its not a one way street but this makes more libre thing. Canonical didnt make it proprietary to create a one way street but made it more libre by adopting AGPL license which gives users more rights to the code

Could you expand on that? What is it that makes that possible?

In short incus has Apache 2.0 copyright licene that states:

You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole

While AGPL v3.0 that Canonical just adopted states:

You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

. . .

You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy ...

Meaning if incus uses any part of Canonicals source their code can't be licenced under Apache but rather AGPL v3.0, which pulls any other derivative of incus.

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