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I am not a lawyer, but the only point of the SSPL at this stage is to prevent direct competition from companies who would just take the project and sell it as t

I am not a lawyer, but the only point of the SSPL at this stage is to prevent direct competition from companies who would just take the project and sell it as their own. It's the same license used by MongoDB. That said, it's on us to make this as clear as possible, and we'll work with our lawyers to do that. We want people using this wherever they have a need for it, and they shouldn't feel threatened by the license.

ryukafalz 5y ago
Yeah, the big difference between this and MongoDB is that MongoDB is typically only ever used on the backend of an application. You generally wouldn't give someone else direct access to your MongoDB instance, but you might give them access to your VPN, at which point as far as I can tell the SSPL distribution requirements would kick in. (Because you're "enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program ... remotely through a computer network.") This is probably fine for internal usage within a company (as the whole company is legally the same entity) but for individual use it's concerning. Although it might also be problematic if you ever want to give a contractor access to your VPN too.
- basch 5y ago
  Would you be giving everyone in your network direct access to your management gui? If the clients are just running wireguard and their own copy of an interface, would you be fine? Your friends are interacting with your copy of wireguard not Netmaker. (This comment applies to their future roadmap moreso than their current offering.)
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    If the clients were really only interacting with Wireguard, then... yes, I think you're right. But yeah, their current offering has the clients connecting with the server via a gRPC API, so at the moment I think it's still an issue. Unless you're using external clients[0] for almost everything, but that eliminates a big part of the reason for using this. Covers the contractor use case I think (provided the contractor isn't running services they intend to expose to you on the VPN), but not my hobbyist use case (both me and a friend share services with each other via our VPN). [0] https://docs.netmaker.org/external-clients.html https://docs.netmaker.org/external-clients.html
- afeiszli 5y ago
  That's a very fair point. I'll note again that I'm not a lawyer, but our intention is definitely not to limit those sorts of use cases. If it does, we need to make some changes. I'm going to make sure we figure out a clear way that allows people to do this. We went with SSPL because it's a lot easier to start restrictive and switch to more open than vice versa, but we're definitely open to making a change if it's going to prevent regular usage.

ryukafalz 5y ago

Yeah, the big difference between this and MongoDB is that MongoDB is typically only ever used on the backend of an application. You generally wouldn't give someone else direct access to your MongoDB instance, but you might give them access to your VPN, at which point as far as I can tell the SSPL distribution requirements would kick in. (Because you're "enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program ... remotely through a computer network.") This is probably fine for internal usage within a company (as the whole company is legally the same entity) but for individual use it's concerning. Although it might also be problematic if you ever want to give a contractor access to your VPN too.

basch 5y ago
Would you be giving everyone in your network direct access to your management gui? If the clients are just running wireguard and their own copy of an interface, would you be fine? Your friends are interacting with your copy of wireguard not Netmaker. (This comment applies to their future roadmap moreso than their current offering.)
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  If the clients were really only interacting with Wireguard, then... yes, I think you're right. But yeah, their current offering has the clients connecting with the server via a gRPC API, so at the moment I think it's still an issue. Unless you're using external clients[0] for almost everything, but that eliminates a big part of the reason for using this. Covers the contractor use case I think (provided the contractor isn't running services they intend to expose to you on the VPN), but not my hobbyist use case (both me and a friend share services with each other via our VPN). [0] https://docs.netmaker.org/external-clients.html https://docs.netmaker.org/external-clients.html
afeiszli 5y ago
That's a very fair point. I'll note again that I'm not a lawyer, but our intention is definitely not to limit those sorts of use cases. If it does, we need to make some changes. I'm going to make sure we figure out a clear way that allows people to do this. We went with SSPL because it's a lot easier to start restrictive and switch to more open than vice versa, but we're definitely open to making a change if it's going to prevent regular usage.