Comment by pronkin
2 years ago
Because we want to provide other organizations with the opportunity to offer paid sync services, we needed to incorporate the concept of a network into the license. We crafted the license with that consideration in mind
You may employed a wrong strategy.
To prevent paid sync services, you should license your protocols and data formats in AGPL, which requires derivative work (third-party sync services) to be open sourced.
The client app in contrast, should be fine even in permissive licenses.
> Because we want to provide other organizations with the opportunity to offer paid sync services
Why do you think the GPL is not compatible with this?
Exactly…
Plus, they can always offer other licenses in addition to the GPL (or really AGPL would be a better fit for their concerns). It’s their software, so they can license it to anyone with whatever terms they want. (Assuming there aren’t outside contributions, but even that can be dealt with)
> Plus, they can always offer other licenses in addition to the GPL
Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking. They're clearly offering alternative licenses to the one in the public repository. There is no reason the same tactic couldn't be applied with the GPL.