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What should we do about license violations in apps that rely on work of Lemmy contributors? (self.opensource)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Freesoftwareenjoyer to c/[email protected]

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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 :)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Freesoftwareenjoyer 2 points 2 years ago

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.