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 :)
I believe it’s up to the license holder to enforce it.
So notifying the respective projects can’t hurt, but if they refuse to comply, and the copyright owner of lemmy-js-client doesn’t care, then the code is probably licensed incorrectly
I mean if you really wanted to enforce it, anyone who contributed to Lemmy-js-client can submit a DMCA takedown. But that would be beyond silly, since most people are just trying to build cool things and don’t want to enter a licensing drama.
Best course of action is to point out the license error and let downstream figure it out.
Perhaps it would be silly in this case, but if someone made a proprietary app using a Copyleft licensed library, that wouldn’t be fun.