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.

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.

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.

  • ampersandcastles@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    23 days ago

    “Copyleft licenses do not only benefit the developers. They also guarantee freedoms to users of the software. They reduce the risk of exploitive business practices, like creating a modified version of Forgejo with less freedoms to the users, which could ultimately trap users in a vendor lock-in.”

    God, you absolutely love to see it. So called “permissive” licenses should be banned because of this.