Under which license are the CODE binaries / Docker images distributed?
I failed to find any explicit reference to the license directly in the CODE-related web sites.
The source code itself is MPL 2.0, that’s well documented.
However, Collabora Online MPLv2 License Information - Collabora Office and Collabora Online states that the binaries distributed by Collabora are distributed with additional restrictions and under a proprietary license, but fails to say (as far as I can see) which restrictions and under which licensing terms… Does this proprietary license also hold for the CODE binaries, and which conditions do apply?
This should clearly be stated more explicitly on the CODE web sites and maybe also on the Dockerhub page.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any reply so far - I’d assume that especially the developers should be interested in clarifying this issue, to ensure
- that noone is accidentally violating their license policy and
- that no possible user is “scared off” by a possibly unintended interpretation of the license rules, possibly thinking (s)he is not allowed to use CODE even though (s)he actually is.
Does noone have any insight here?
This is a good question; thanks for that. Our goal with licensing is to encourage people to contribute to the open-source code-base, and make the project grow in feature / function / sustainability. That’s partly why we like the MPLv2’s copy-left nature.
We’ve not reviewed our licensing policy for CODE recently - clearly all the source code is available as MPLv2 as well as various other FOSS licenses for the dependencies. The trademark and CSS theming are owned by Collabora and are proprietary.
As you say - we need to think through more carefully how we clarify our licensing here, it is on a big backlog of things that need doing; I appreciate feedback about whatever use-case you’re interested in - what is that ?
The intention is that our CODE binaries are not suitable for use in production in the enterprise as a ‘free of charge’ alternative that allows companies to avoid contributing to COOL. If you want that - you need to build, brand and support it yourself from the MPLv2 source.
Larger users are encouraged to contribute either directly themselves, or via Collabora, or one of our partners. COOL itself has a EULA like this: End User License and Subscription Agreement - Collabora Office and Collabora Online - probably we should tweak and extend that to cover the small CSS / theming bits in CODE.
Does that help ? =) I’d be happy to have thoughts by E-mail on how we can improve here, and what your use-cases are.
Thanks.