← Back to context

Comment by noahtallen

5 years ago

I’m no expert, but I’m fairly sure that Frenk’s license has to be compatible with home assistance’s license for it to be included. If home assistance has a normal OSS license, I doubt it can use a dependency with a very restrictive license. (Such as one with a list of what can use it!) In other words, I don’t think it’s possible form him to transitively make home assistant’s license more restrictive.

Home Assistant itself uses the Apache 2.0 license, which is pretty permissive. It doesn't impose much requirements on derivative works, so it can use a dependency with a restrictive license without problem.

However, this would become problematic if Home Assistant also uses a GPL dependency (which it probably does). That dependency would impose a requirement that all other libraries used by Home Assistant use a GPL-compatible license (which his license likely wouldn't be).