Forgejo is changing its license to a Copyleft license. This blog post will try to bring clarity about the impact to you, explain the motivation behind this change and answer some questions you might have.

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Developers who choose to publish their work under a copyleft license are excluded from participating in software that is published under a permissive license. That is at the opposite of the core values of the Forgejo project and in June 2023 it was decided to also accept copylefted contributions. A year later, in August 2024, the first pull request to take advantage of this opportunity was proposed and merged.

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Forgejo versions starting from v9.0 are now released under the GPL v3+ and earlier Forgejo versions, including v8.0 and v7.0 patch releases remain under the MIT license.

  • @[email protected]English
    49•4 months ago

    So, for the slow people in the back… (me)

    Copyleft = permanently open source? Ie, you can’t take the open source code/project and make it closed source? (or build a new closed project off of it?)

    Or am I misunderstanding?

    • @[email protected]English
      38•4 months ago

      Yep, that’s the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they’d need the permission of all of the copyright holders who’ve contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

    • @[email protected]
      8•4 months ago

      Copyleft means: “if you modify the program and share it, you also have to include the source code for your modifications.”

      The owner of the copyright (usually the developers or their employer) can still change the license later.

    • @[email protected]
      8•4 months ago

      AGPLv3 is not anti-business or anti-money. It’s saying if you want to use the code in a closed source project you need to pay the copyright holder

      The copyright holder is the original author, not a maintainer or someone who forked a project and renamed it.

      That’s why the #1 thing mentioned in copyleft licenses is you can’t alter the copyright notice and declare yourself the original author

      AGPLv3 is a good license to choose. All the other licenses are naive and do not combat closed source projects and the slave worker that keeps our projects unfunded