14 ms·

Why I replaced MIT with copyleft license for Nodemailer

103 points by andris9 10y ago

whitten 10y ago
andris9, you mentioned that the EUPL was more European Union friendly, similar to how GPL is more USA friendly. Do you mind elaborating what you mean by this?
- andris9 10y ago
  IANAL but as EU citizen doing stuff in EU I don't really care about the implications of US patent system. What I do care about is a license that is in a local language, designed specifically for the EU jurisdiction so every court would understand what its exactly about. In general though I don't think there's a huge difference as it's hard to believe that I would actually ever go to court based on some license terms.
wccrawford 10y ago
Spoiler: Money.
- X86BSD 10y ago
  So why not just close it and sell it then? Using a license to extort money from commercial entities who he seems to say use it without paying a dime for it and operating under the guise of open source is... warped in my pov. I don't begrudge him making phat loot. But if that's the goal open source is not the right avenue imo. Let the flame war begin but I don't see the point in open sourcing code if you don't want people to use it however they want. YMMV and probably does.
  - jackbravo 10y ago
    Under a copyleft license you CAN use it however you want. You just are obliged to open source any modification you make to it. I'm not sure how the "derived works" clause applies to node.js projects using this project.
    - e12e 10y ago
      You're obligated to also distribute sources to changes if you distribute. You can implement single-image clustering on top of the Linux kernel all you want, and keep your changes - so long as you don't distribute the software. If you do, you must distribute under the gpl.
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      GPL and LGPL require that users of your software have to be able to relink with their own version of the copyleft code. It's not enough just to provide the source (for compiled languages).
  - wvenable 10y ago
    All copyleft licenses have the same principle; to promote openness. This is explicitly not the same as "use it however they want". I think the motivation to not have your open source code used in a closed source product that is sold for profit should be obvious.
    - 0mp 10y ago
      Also, the motivation seems to be a desire for building a bigger community which gives back its improvements. ZeroMQ for example sticks to LGPL for the very reason - they believe that it is easier to build a community and discourage "dark forks" when software is licensed under GPL-like license. (See http://zeromq.org/area:faq#toc4 http://zeromq.org/area:faq#toc4).
      - williamstein 10y ago
        They have tried hard for the last year it relicense zeromq under a much more liberals license, but have had trouble getting all permissions.
  - stock_toaster 10y ago
    Additionally, the requirement for being able to sell a business friendly license, seems to imply that any community code contributions must now assign copyright of the contribution to the project owner (CLA?). Otherwise, wouldn't you then have features locked to the EUPL version? (presumably...I am not familiar with the EUPL at all though)
  - wmf 10y ago
    The open source version acts as advertising for the paid version. It also allows programmers to imagine that they will get paid (without even having to do "business stuff" like marketing) and get open source cred at the same time. This rarely works but the other open source business models never work, so it's the leader.
  - prodigal_erik 10y ago
    I want you to benefit from my work only if I also benefit from your work. If you seek an unfair advantage over me, I will not cooperate.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    Others have pointed some reasons, but there's also another important one. Copyleft is a promise to he end-users that - no matter the circumstances - they won't be stuck with whatever they were served, but would be able to maintain or hire someone to maintain. It's not only freedom to adapt and modify the code, but also - when a project is a library - a freedom to not be stuck with ancient bug-ridden insecure builds if there are newer versions. So if you ask "why copyleft?" think how much abandonware with statically linked libraries (e.g. ancient OpenSSL) you've seen.
- netule 10y ago
  I am not sure how this is supposed to start making him money. Doesn't the sticky nature of GPL-like licenses only apply if you redistribute the GPL licensed software alongside your own package or make a derivative?
  - e12e 10y ago
    From the text I'm not sure the idea really is to make the author money. If anything, presumably any code others contribute now will be copyleft, meaning if the patches are integrated and re-distributed by the author he can charge for distribution - but have to distribute under copyleft. I also wonder how many corporations integrate and redistribute nodemailer; I'm sure there's a few - but I'm guessing most just use nodemailer. Apart from paranoid legal teams, the licence change shouldn't make any difference. Now, someone distributing a firewall appliance using nodemailer for sending email alerts would have to provide customers with a copy of nodemailer source under copyleft - along with any changes. I still don't see why that would translate to payments to the author.
  - edem 10y ago
    It does. For example MongoDB is AGPL. BUT if you add nodemailer to your project as a dependency and you link to it GPL will stick. This is why MongoDB's drivers are Apache license but the database itself is AGPL.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
      So, someone told me that your code need not be GPL but that the combination of your code + a gpled program must be. IANAL, but this sounded reasonable to me.
      - Crespyl 10y ago
        The trick is in what constitutes "combination", particularly re. static vs. dynamic linking. My understanding is that, at least with LGPL, you can have a closed source program distributed with a LGPL shared object/dll (plus license text) that gets loaded dynamically, but I don't think you can do that with GPL proper. Static linking (IIUC) is right out (for closed source projects).
- daveguy 10y ago
  And the reason he hasn't made money off it in the last 5-6 years has nothing to do with the license -- it is because sending emails from an API is a very saturated market. From custom remailer apis to built-in provide-your-own-SMTP-server options there are plenty of ways to send email from code and most of them are cheap to free.
- vacri 10y ago
  That's a pretty uncharitable reading of his reasoning. A better description would be "companies are profiting off my unpaid work without upholding their end of the social bargain, whether that's money or maintainer hours or whatever". A better reading would be that he feels the current situation is unfair, rather than suddenly wanting to monetise.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    There's nothing unfair about that situation though. People using open source without giving back, and possibly even making money on it without giving back, is perfectly fine. There's no contract, social or otherwise (aside from the license terms), and the perception that there is a unofficial social contract obligating users to contribute back or even do stuff like just file bugs or interact with the community is actually an impediment to getting people to use open source. This concept of a social contract misrepresents both the letter and the spirit of open source, including copyleft, and gives people who don't know any better the impression that using open source would obligate to do something beyond just complying with the license (even if it's presented as a matter of etiquette rather than an actual legal obligation). If anyone's out there writing open source code because they anticipate getting anything in return from anybody, ever, for their efforts, they have misunderstood the spirit of the thing and will most likely be disappointed.
    - vacri 10y ago
      > This concept of a social contract misrepresents both the letter and the spirit of open source, including copyleft Eh? The GPL is a copyleft license that was made to do just this, both in letter and in spirit. "Getting code back" is its explicit purpose. > If anyone's out there writing open source code because they anticipate getting anything in return from anybody, ever, for their efforts, they have misunderstood the spirit of the thing and will most likely be disappointed. Open Source and Free Software are similar but different, and you're conflating the two. Redhat is the canonical example of someone who writes FOSS because they anticipate getting stuff for it. Atlassian also writes specifically open-source stuff; you can inspect it, but you can't use it without paying a license. And I think you're semantically wrong anyway - if you're writing free software because you're community-minded, then it's not unreasonable to expect some engagement from the community, especially for a popular project. No-one is legally obligated to help you, but at the same time, for so many to use your stuff and so few to kick a little back over so many years is something that a reasonable person could be a bit sour on.
scandox 10y ago
It's a great piece of software. I use it in two projects both commercial platforms though not particularly big money makers. The problem for me is I remain somewhat uncertain about the implications. If I use this within a service that requires payment from customers, it seems to me there is no change. And most software using this is likely to be delivered as a service right? Maybe I misunderstand the license. In a way if the approach was more aggressive it would be easier for me. I could just go to the people that write the cheques and say: we use this software. New version requires payment. Write a cheque. As it is I'm not sure whether we have to pay or not. As for donations - well I could make one personally (in fact I will) but it is unlikely to be 780 euros...
- e12e 10y ago
  As I've mentioned elsewhere - I don't fully follow the reasoning either - the post is unclear. Maybe people are selling spam/crm software that uses nodemailer for sending emails? If it's sold as a saas - this change makes no difference (hence see the Gnu Apl) - if it's sold as traditional software - perhaps it will make difference in some rare cases (applications with unreasonably tight coupling).
- reality_czech 10y ago
  It looks very LGPL-like in spirit. It's hard to know if you can use it in something commercial or not, though. The pessimistic interpretation is that if you use it your software becomes a "derived work" of the library, in the same way your Harry Potter fan fiction is a derived work of Harry Potter. You probably don't want your commercial software under this license because it commits you to (among other things) granting royalty-free licenses to all patents, and settling all court cases in the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The optimistic assumption is that no, that would never happen, your product will not be a derived work because using the library with it is "mere aggregation." But the license doens't clearly spell out what is a dervied work and what is not-- there is not even the discussion of mere aggregation that the GPL has. The license also has the "death penalty" clause that the GPL does, which means that your license to use it can be permanently terminated if you are found to have violated any part of it. So basically, I would say, stay away. And people in open source projects should stay away too, for the same reasons... you don't want this fighting it out with the existing open source license of your project.
danjoc 10y ago
Smart guy. Copyleft for the open source crowd to use freely, commercial license for businesses who want to keep their own source closed. I wonder where you get a good commercial license to use like this. Is it always a custom thing requiring expensive lawyers or is there some repo of commercial licenses one can use?
- jrpt 10y ago
  You can use Supported Source: https://supportedsource.org/ https://supportedsource.org/ It's not copyleft, but if you ask you might be able to use it that way.
  - jordigh 10y ago
    Supported Source is more or less shareware with visible source code. It's not free software or open source. Selling copyleft exceptions works fine with existing free and open source licenses.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    Not only is it not copyleft, it's not free software nor open source software. It's proprietary software by another name.
- makomk 10y ago
  Open source software developers probably won't want to touch this with a bargepole. Oddball copyleft licenses are a pain in the ass to deal with an invariably incompatible with every other copyleft license including the GPL.
  - shortstuffsushi 10y ago
    Came here to say much the same. GPL / non-MIT generally = avoid, because IANAL and don't want to figure out if I'm in the right or wrong.
  - badsectoracula 10y ago
    Note that EUPL is explicitly compatible with GPL and a few other licenses in that it allows you to license a derivative work under GPL (or the other license) instead of EUPL.
nikcub 10y ago
Donations for open source projects have notoriously low participation rates - to the point where popular and critical infrastructure projects can't afford to maintain a fulltime employee or two - so don't take it personally. If you want companies to pay you, then ask them to pay you. Keep it as a simple license (not one that has devs asking wtf it is), but offer a commercial bundle with email and dev support, LTS, backwards compat and perhaps authentication modules (for LDAP/AD, OAuth) and I think you'd be surprised by just how many companies make these purchases (I make them all the time). Also, on price - $100-300 is "no-brainer i'll put it on my credit card and expense it at the end of the month" while €800 is approaching purchasing decision territory for a lot of companies.
- haser_au 10y ago
  Speaking from my corner of a large organisation, this is pretty spot on. $100-300 is "no brainer". LDAP/AD, OAuth is major plus. Support SLAs tiers are also something we would look for, even in Open Source. We don't use Nodemailer, but we might now that I know about it. I'll see if we have a use case.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  Was just wrestling with mailing from node this week, and have seen reference to nodemailer. Reading his notice, it seemed like a nicer version of the itext pdf library license change. I completely understand the motivation behind both, but $800 is just out of my budget (and the budget of many of the projects I work on). Slight rant - the itext license change was frustrating because we were using it on a project, and then the license change happened. The minimum price seems to be $2500, and I couldn't tell if it was per year or what. But to have it on a dev machine, and a test server too, drove the price up more - something close to $6000 IIRC (but it's been a while since I looked in to it). I completely understand the motivation behind the pricing changes, and if it turns out that fewer people use it, but they pay... that still works out for most parties. I'd encourage the nodemailer author to consider a couple other options - something under $500 for commercial usage, and a higher price point for some extra degree of support (1 business day turnaround time, etc?). As others have noted, a smaller amount is something I can float or simply absorb - larger amounts introduce hesitation, or pushback from clients on pricing (especially if it's a term/time license).
RangerScience 10y ago
Hmm. A wee bit off-topic, but is there a license of these sorts that do the "free until you make X revenue", similar to those used by Unreal and Unity?
mintplant 10y ago
I understand the switch to copyleft, but the EU's own website explicitly lists GPL licenses as incompatible, in the matrix on this page: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl/eupl-compatible-open-source-licences https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl/eupl-compatib... Dual-licensing under the EUPL and GPL, with the option to choose either, would be helpful. Otherwise Nodemailer is incompatible with the majority of other copyleft code.
- tomprince 10y ago
  Looking closer, you can't incorporate GPL code in a EUPL project, but you can incorporate EUPL code in a GPL project. The EUPL explicitly is allowed to be used as part of GPLv2 project, and indirectly as part of a GPLv2 project via the CeCILL v2 licenses which has a similar provision.
libman 10y ago
There is no rational reason to use copyleft licenses – they benefit no one but the lawyers. A significant and growing number of people recognize that software encumbered by pages of legalese threats is NOT free software, and boycott it for philosophical if not practical reasons. Restrictive license is the 21st century equivalent of a leaper's bell. The author will see a drop in users, donations, and even employment prospects as the result of this extremely foolish decision. Read copyfree.org

103 points by andris9 10y ago

andris9, you mentioned that the EUPL was more European Union friendly, similar to how GPL is more USA friendly. Do you mind elaborating what you mean by this?

andris9 10y ago
IANAL but as EU citizen doing stuff in EU I don't really care about the implications of US patent system. What I do care about is a license that is in a local language, designed specifically for the EU jurisdiction so every court would understand what its exactly about. In general though I don't think there's a huge difference as it's hard to believe that I would actually ever go to court based on some license terms.

wccrawford 10y ago

Spoiler: Money.

X86BSD 10y ago
So why not just close it and sell it then? Using a license to extort money from commercial entities who he seems to say use it without paying a dime for it and operating under the guise of open source is... warped in my pov. I don't begrudge him making phat loot. But if that's the goal open source is not the right avenue imo. Let the flame war begin but I don't see the point in open sourcing code if you don't want people to use it however they want. YMMV and probably does.
- jackbravo 10y ago
  Under a copyleft license you CAN use it however you want. You just are obliged to open source any modification you make to it. I'm not sure how the "derived works" clause applies to node.js projects using this project.
  - e12e 10y ago
    You're obligated to also distribute sources to changes if you distribute. You can implement single-image clustering on top of the Linux kernel all you want, and keep your changes - so long as you don't distribute the software. If you do, you must distribute under the gpl.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    GPL and LGPL require that users of your software have to be able to relink with their own version of the copyleft code. It's not enough just to provide the source (for compiled languages).
- wvenable 10y ago
  All copyleft licenses have the same principle; to promote openness. This is explicitly not the same as "use it however they want". I think the motivation to not have your open source code used in a closed source product that is sold for profit should be obvious.
  - 0mp 10y ago
    Also, the motivation seems to be a desire for building a bigger community which gives back its improvements. ZeroMQ for example sticks to LGPL for the very reason - they believe that it is easier to build a community and discourage "dark forks" when software is licensed under GPL-like license. (See http://zeromq.org/area:faq#toc4 http://zeromq.org/area:faq#toc4).
    - williamstein 10y ago
      They have tried hard for the last year it relicense zeromq under a much more liberals license, but have had trouble getting all permissions.
- stock_toaster 10y ago
  Additionally, the requirement for being able to sell a business friendly license, seems to imply that any community code contributions must now assign copyright of the contribution to the project owner (CLA?). Otherwise, wouldn't you then have features locked to the EUPL version? (presumably...I am not familiar with the EUPL at all though)
- wmf 10y ago
  The open source version acts as advertising for the paid version. It also allows programmers to imagine that they will get paid (without even having to do "business stuff" like marketing) and get open source cred at the same time. This rarely works but the other open source business models never work, so it's the leader.
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  I want you to benefit from my work only if I also benefit from your work. If you seek an unfair advantage over me, I will not cooperate.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  Others have pointed some reasons, but there's also another important one. Copyleft is a promise to he end-users that - no matter the circumstances - they won't be stuck with whatever they were served, but would be able to maintain or hire someone to maintain. It's not only freedom to adapt and modify the code, but also - when a project is a library - a freedom to not be stuck with ancient bug-ridden insecure builds if there are newer versions. So if you ask "why copyleft?" think how much abandonware with statically linked libraries (e.g. ancient OpenSSL) you've seen.
netule 10y ago
I am not sure how this is supposed to start making him money. Doesn't the sticky nature of GPL-like licenses only apply if you redistribute the GPL licensed software alongside your own package or make a derivative?
- e12e 10y ago
  From the text I'm not sure the idea really is to make the author money. If anything, presumably any code others contribute now will be copyleft, meaning if the patches are integrated and re-distributed by the author he can charge for distribution - but have to distribute under copyleft. I also wonder how many corporations integrate and redistribute nodemailer; I'm sure there's a few - but I'm guessing most just use nodemailer. Apart from paranoid legal teams, the licence change shouldn't make any difference. Now, someone distributing a firewall appliance using nodemailer for sending email alerts would have to provide customers with a copy of nodemailer source under copyleft - along with any changes. I still don't see why that would translate to payments to the author.
- edem 10y ago
  It does. For example MongoDB is AGPL. BUT if you add nodemailer to your project as a dependency and you link to it GPL will stick. This is why MongoDB's drivers are Apache license but the database itself is AGPL.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    So, someone told me that your code need not be GPL but that the combination of your code + a gpled program must be. IANAL, but this sounded reasonable to me.
    - Crespyl 10y ago
      The trick is in what constitutes "combination", particularly re. static vs. dynamic linking. My understanding is that, at least with LGPL, you can have a closed source program distributed with a LGPL shared object/dll (plus license text) that gets loaded dynamically, but I don't think you can do that with GPL proper. Static linking (IIUC) is right out (for closed source projects).
daveguy 10y ago
And the reason he hasn't made money off it in the last 5-6 years has nothing to do with the license -- it is because sending emails from an API is a very saturated market. From custom remailer apis to built-in provide-your-own-SMTP-server options there are plenty of ways to send email from code and most of them are cheap to free.
vacri 10y ago
That's a pretty uncharitable reading of his reasoning. A better description would be "companies are profiting off my unpaid work without upholding their end of the social bargain, whether that's money or maintainer hours or whatever". A better reading would be that he feels the current situation is unfair, rather than suddenly wanting to monetise.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  There's nothing unfair about that situation though. People using open source without giving back, and possibly even making money on it without giving back, is perfectly fine. There's no contract, social or otherwise (aside from the license terms), and the perception that there is a unofficial social contract obligating users to contribute back or even do stuff like just file bugs or interact with the community is actually an impediment to getting people to use open source. This concept of a social contract misrepresents both the letter and the spirit of open source, including copyleft, and gives people who don't know any better the impression that using open source would obligate to do something beyond just complying with the license (even if it's presented as a matter of etiquette rather than an actual legal obligation). If anyone's out there writing open source code because they anticipate getting anything in return from anybody, ever, for their efforts, they have misunderstood the spirit of the thing and will most likely be disappointed.
  - vacri 10y ago
    > This concept of a social contract misrepresents both the letter and the spirit of open source, including copyleft Eh? The GPL is a copyleft license that was made to do just this, both in letter and in spirit. "Getting code back" is its explicit purpose. > If anyone's out there writing open source code because they anticipate getting anything in return from anybody, ever, for their efforts, they have misunderstood the spirit of the thing and will most likely be disappointed. Open Source and Free Software are similar but different, and you're conflating the two. Redhat is the canonical example of someone who writes FOSS because they anticipate getting stuff for it. Atlassian also writes specifically open-source stuff; you can inspect it, but you can't use it without paying a license. And I think you're semantically wrong anyway - if you're writing free software because you're community-minded, then it's not unreasonable to expect some engagement from the community, especially for a popular project. No-one is legally obligated to help you, but at the same time, for so many to use your stuff and so few to kick a little back over so many years is something that a reasonable person could be a bit sour on.

scandox 10y ago

It's a great piece of software. I use it in two projects both commercial platforms though not particularly big money makers. The problem for me is I remain somewhat uncertain about the implications. If I use this within a service that requires payment from customers, it seems to me there is no change. And most software using this is likely to be delivered as a service right? Maybe I misunderstand the license. In a way if the approach was more aggressive it would be easier for me. I could just go to the people that write the cheques and say: we use this software. New version requires payment. Write a cheque. As it is I'm not sure whether we have to pay or not. As for donations - well I could make one personally (in fact I will) but it is unlikely to be 780 euros...

e12e 10y ago
As I've mentioned elsewhere - I don't fully follow the reasoning either - the post is unclear. Maybe people are selling spam/crm software that uses nodemailer for sending emails? If it's sold as a saas - this change makes no difference (hence see the Gnu Apl) - if it's sold as traditional software - perhaps it will make difference in some rare cases (applications with unreasonably tight coupling).
reality_czech 10y ago
It looks very LGPL-like in spirit. It's hard to know if you can use it in something commercial or not, though. The pessimistic interpretation is that if you use it your software becomes a "derived work" of the library, in the same way your Harry Potter fan fiction is a derived work of Harry Potter. You probably don't want your commercial software under this license because it commits you to (among other things) granting royalty-free licenses to all patents, and settling all court cases in the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The optimistic assumption is that no, that would never happen, your product will not be a derived work because using the library with it is "mere aggregation." But the license doens't clearly spell out what is a dervied work and what is not-- there is not even the discussion of mere aggregation that the GPL has. The license also has the "death penalty" clause that the GPL does, which means that your license to use it can be permanently terminated if you are found to have violated any part of it. So basically, I would say, stay away. And people in open source projects should stay away too, for the same reasons... you don't want this fighting it out with the existing open source license of your project.

danjoc 10y ago

Smart guy. Copyleft for the open source crowd to use freely, commercial license for businesses who want to keep their own source closed. I wonder where you get a good commercial license to use like this. Is it always a custom thing requiring expensive lawyers or is there some repo of commercial licenses one can use?

jrpt 10y ago
You can use Supported Source: https://supportedsource.org/ https://supportedsource.org/ It's not copyleft, but if you ask you might be able to use it that way.
- jordigh 10y ago
  Supported Source is more or less shareware with visible source code. It's not free software or open source. Selling copyleft exceptions works fine with existing free and open source licenses.
- davexunit 10y ago
  Not only is it not copyleft, it's not free software nor open source software. It's proprietary software by another name.
makomk 10y ago
Open source software developers probably won't want to touch this with a bargepole. Oddball copyleft licenses are a pain in the ass to deal with an invariably incompatible with every other copyleft license including the GPL.
- shortstuffsushi 10y ago
  Came here to say much the same. GPL / non-MIT generally = avoid, because IANAL and don't want to figure out if I'm in the right or wrong.
- badsectoracula 10y ago
  Note that EUPL is explicitly compatible with GPL and a few other licenses in that it allows you to license a derivative work under GPL (or the other license) instead of EUPL.

nikcub 10y ago

Donations for open source projects have notoriously low participation rates - to the point where popular and critical infrastructure projects can't afford to maintain a fulltime employee or two - so don't take it personally. If you want companies to pay you, then ask them to pay you. Keep it as a simple license (not one that has devs asking wtf it is), but offer a commercial bundle with email and dev support, LTS, backwards compat and perhaps authentication modules (for LDAP/AD, OAuth) and I think you'd be surprised by just how many companies make these purchases (I make them all the time). Also, on price - $100-300 is "no-brainer i'll put it on my credit card and expense it at the end of the month" while €800 is approaching purchasing decision territory for a lot of companies.

haser_au 10y ago
Speaking from my corner of a large organisation, this is pretty spot on. $100-300 is "no brainer". LDAP/AD, OAuth is major plus. Support SLAs tiers are also something we would look for, even in Open Source. We don't use Nodemailer, but we might now that I know about it. I'll see if we have a use case.
mgkimsal 10y ago
Was just wrestling with mailing from node this week, and have seen reference to nodemailer. Reading his notice, it seemed like a nicer version of the itext pdf library license change. I completely understand the motivation behind both, but $800 is just out of my budget (and the budget of many of the projects I work on). Slight rant - the itext license change was frustrating because we were using it on a project, and then the license change happened. The minimum price seems to be $2500, and I couldn't tell if it was per year or what. But to have it on a dev machine, and a test server too, drove the price up more - something close to $6000 IIRC (but it's been a while since I looked in to it). I completely understand the motivation behind the pricing changes, and if it turns out that fewer people use it, but they pay... that still works out for most parties. I'd encourage the nodemailer author to consider a couple other options - something under $500 for commercial usage, and a higher price point for some extra degree of support (1 business day turnaround time, etc?). As others have noted, a smaller amount is something I can float or simply absorb - larger amounts introduce hesitation, or pushback from clients on pricing (especially if it's a term/time license).

RangerScience 10y ago

Hmm. A wee bit off-topic, but is there a license of these sorts that do the "free until you make X revenue", similar to those used by Unreal and Unity?

mintplant 10y ago

I understand the switch to copyleft, but the EU's own website explicitly lists GPL licenses as incompatible, in the matrix on this page: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl/eupl-compatible-open-source-licences https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl/eupl-compatib... Dual-licensing under the EUPL and GPL, with the option to choose either, would be helpful. Otherwise Nodemailer is incompatible with the majority of other copyleft code.

tomprince 10y ago
Looking closer, you can't incorporate GPL code in a EUPL project, but you can incorporate EUPL code in a GPL project. The EUPL explicitly is allowed to be used as part of GPLv2 project, and indirectly as part of a GPLv2 project via the CeCILL v2 licenses which has a similar provision.

libman 10y ago

There is no rational reason to use copyleft licenses – they benefit no one but the lawyers. A significant and growing number of people recognize that software encumbered by pages of legalese threats is NOT free software, and boycott it for philosophical if not practical reasons. Restrictive license is the 21st century equivalent of a leaper's bell. The author will see a drop in users, donations, and even employment prospects as the result of this extremely foolish decision. Read copyfree.org