Add LICENSE

[ezekg]

⚠️ Blocked by #671. EE PR must be merged BEFORE license PR, otherwise the version at that commit could be used without an EE license, since no EE licensing code would be present in the codebase.

Part of #644. I think I'm starting to settle on the ELv2 license.

[ezekg]

AFAICT, the ELv2 license doesn't require that modifications to be open sourced. But I think that would be beneficial.

Maybe we should go AGPLv3 after all?

[ezekg]

HN seems to dislike ELv2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115263 (also this beauty) 🙃

They seem to prefer BSL.

[ezekg]

I don't like the 4 year anniversary clause of BSL, and I think I still lean ELv2 over AGPLv3.

I think I misunderstood the BSL license. After looking into it more, I actually do kind of like it. I thought the 4-year clause was for all code, but it’s for the current code, not future code.

E.g. with each release, Sentry increments the Change Date parameter, so that particular release goes OSS after that date, but that date does not apply to future releases.

With the Additional Use Grant, it essentially offers the same protection as ELv2, but eventually goes OSS (so any “derived” competitors would be 4 years out of sync).

Refs:

• https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028ce1d81a9b1148f7e9ba2673bf95/licenses/BSL.txt#L8-L16
• https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commits/master/LICENSE

[ezekg]

One thing the BSL doesn’t cover is the circumvention of license keys within the software, which I may do for SAML/SSO (using encrypted license files). Unless added to the Additional Use Grant, anybody could remove the license checks. With ELv2, I'd at least have legal recourse to remove forks that nix the licensing checks.

ELv2 arguably makes it all much simpler.

[ezekg]

I'm going to stick to ELv2, which better protects both Keygen EE and Cloud.