guarantee FOSS licensing of SixtyFPS

[Be-ing]

I'm really interested and excited for what SixtyFPS will become, but I'm also very wary of using it, promoting it, or contributing to it because of the CLA, especially in the context of recent events.

To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable license under the Copyright covering the Contribution, with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and distribute the Contribution as part of the Material; provided that this license is conditioned upon compliance with Section 2.3.

This is not a fair exchange. There is no assurance that SixtyFPS won't become completely proprietary in the future and new versions of SixtyFPS will become unavailable to application developers using it with the GPL license. I don't like giving SixtyFPS permission to use code I'd contribute as proprietary software, but it would be tolerable if there was a legal commitment that SixtyFPS will always be available as FOSS like the KDE Free Qt Foundation's agreement with the Qt Company. Would you consider adding a clause to the CLA or some other legal commitment that SixtyFPS and future versions of it will always be available as FOSS? I hope as old KDE and Qt developers you understand how important this is for building a community around SixtyFPS.

[tronical]

Hi @Be-ing,

our roots as software developers are in the open source community and we are interested in finding a way to express our commitment to there always being an open source version available. We are open to expressing this in the CLA and more publicly, in the absence of an entity like the KDE Free Qt Foundation. We'll draft something and post it here for review.

[Be-ing]

Disregarding the incoherent rambling above, have you considered how you could make your commitment robust in the event that the SixtyFPS company is sold?

[tronical]

Hi Be-ing,

In full transparency, we are preparing a few changes to the CLA that includes an open source pledge. Below is the paragraph that we would like to add:

2.6 Our Obligation.


We believe that open source software development and communities are the foundation for a healthy ecosystem of high-quality software, where everyone can learn, improve and give back. We commit to upholding this foundation and pledge by promising to continue to develop the Material in the open under an open source license. By making the Material publicly available via GitHub, we ensure that it – the Material – shall be available and accessible to the open source communities.

We will need to make another change since we just created the SixtyFPS GmbH company, and plan to do the two changes at the same time.

@er-vin: You have a point in that this would bring advantages. We haven't really contacted the KDE e.v. yet but we're thinking about it.

[Be-ing]

That looks good, although I think it would be good to define an "open source license" as one approved by the Open Source Initiative to ensure that the license can't be some not-really-open-source license like MongoDB. Even better would be specifying that the open source license must allow combining SixtyFPS with GPL licensed software to ensure that GPL applications using SixtyFPS will be able to continue using it even if the open source license used for SixtyFPS changes.

I would remove the specific mention of GitHub because it could become awkward if you decide to move to different infrastructure in the future. Perhaps just remove the "via GitHub" from that sentence; I think "making the Material publicly available" would be sufficient.

[tronical]

Thanks for the feedback, both of your suggestions make sense. Updated proposal:

2.6 Our Obligation.

We believe that open source software development and communities are the foundation for a healthy ecosystem of high-quality software, where everyone can learn, improve and give back. We commit to upholding this foundation and pledge by promising to continue to develop the Material in the open under an open source license, as approved by the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org). By making the Material publicly available, we ensure that it – the Material – shall be publicly available in our public source code repository and accessible to the open source communities.

[Be-ing]

That looks great, thanks. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on how this project develops and if I start any new GUI applications, this will be the first library I'll try.

[er-vin]

@er-vin: You have a point in that this would bring advantages. We haven't really contacted the KDE e.v. yet but we're thinking about it.

@tronical that would be nice if you did. I fail to see how you can secure over time any guarantees without a trusted third party and a setup like the KDE Free-Qt Foundation otherwise. This is especially important for project/company take overs.

[Be-ing]

@tronical I don't see that text in the current CLA.

[tronical]

We wanted to combine the CLA update with the registration of the company, but then this took longer than we expected. Then we forgot to update it :(. Apologies! It's updated now.