Change the license

[geopjr]

Change the license

[vanillajonathan]

Sounds good! 👍️
Keep in mind though that changing the license is a thing best done sooner rather than later, as it gets more tedious as the number of contributors goes up.

[GeopJr]

First off, IANAL.

From my understanding AGPL still does have use-cases for non-SaaS. For example (and this is based on my understanding that might not be 100% correct), if someone copies/uses a part of a GPL licensed code, then their project becomes a "derivative" of that (which includes SaaS). So I assume the same applies to AGPL and its stricter "rules".

Obviously, there's not much to use/"steal" from Hashbrown, but for bigger projects like Audacity or GNU Image Manipulation Program, that could be a potential use case.

As of switching, I'm not entirely sure if I could, even if I wanted to, without causing too much of a mess. To be honest, if I started Hashbrown today I would go with a far more permissive license.

I'm open to any suggestions on how to move forward but for now I don't think there's any reason to move from AGPL to GPL (apart from some "rules" being useless).

[vanillajonathan]

IANAL either.

My understanding is that AGPL is modified in such a way that it extends the freedoms (the rights to the source code) to the user who interacts with the application even if the interaction is done over the network and the application is hosted elsewhere than on the user's own machine.

I think it is a bit uncommon to use the AGPL in a desktop application, I don't think the license was intended for that. I proposed the GPL since the AGPL is modified from the GPL and since the GPL seems rather commonly used by applications in the GNOME Project. You could use an even more permissive license though, such as the LGPL, MIT, ISC, or 2-clause BSD.

Since this project does not have any Contributor License Agreement (CLA), I believe you would have to get permission from everyone who have made non-trivial contributions to the project.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/55326/can-you-change-a-license-once-you-pick-one

[GeopJr]

Thanks for the info!

For now however, I'll probably stick with AGPL. I understand that it's uncommon for non-SaaS and especially useless for Hashbrown, but changing it would be tedious right now.

I will revisit this issue after #7 and make a final decision, unless Hashbrown being AGPL licensed causes problems to someone's workflow, which will make me act sooner.

As of now, all contributions have been translations so there shouldn't be too much of an issue switching (at least on that part).

Once again, thanks for raising this issue, but for now it's marked as "stalled". I'll add it to my to-do list but feel free to leave this issue open.

P.S. I'm sure you are aware already, but in the off-chance you aren't, being in GNOME Circle != being a GNOME project. The difference is being an app for GNOME vs being an app by GNOME. There are some requirements Hashbrown has to follow (like not having a CLA and having an OSI-Approved license) however following GNOME's usuals(?) (Eg. Licenses, languages, translation systems etc.) Is not one of them. (Not that there's anything wrong with them, they are quite great!)