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 Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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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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[โ€“] warg@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's what I thought as well.

If you just clone the repo there will not be any sources from the AGPL:ed source within the project, only a text mentioning the name.

However if you build it locally, it will pull in the third party libraries. So as long as they aren't distributing any built packages without a AGPL-compatible license, I don't think they are doing anything wrong.

(IANAL)

[โ€“] artichoke@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed, I think this is a misunderstanding as well of the AGPL but IANAL