this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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What should we do about license violations in apps that rely on work of Lemmy contributors? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

File an issue in their repos, sometimes people (understandably) do not understand licencing very well — or it might be they were granted an exception.

If that fails you can contact the library author and the repositories who host the code.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This.

Not all violations are ill-intended, and most amaetur devs aren't specialists in licensing.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most professional developers aren't either. Many companies employ people and/or deploy software to detect license violations

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Oracle has entered the chat.