Consider Alternatives to GPLv3

[darconeous]

I noticed that this project is licensed under the GPLv3. It isn't immediately clear to me if this is actually a permissible license to use with Safari extensions, given that an extension is effectively intermingling in the same logical code space as proprietary website code. I'm not sure if licensing this project under the GPLv3 is sufficient to legally allow it to be used in its intended capacity.

You may want to reconsider the use of the GPLv3, perhaps instead going for the LGPLv2, or even a more permissive license such as MIT or BSD. Even the LGPLv3 (not my first choice) would likely be more appropriate, given the nature of how extensions work.

Note that the license issue described above only applies to the extension, not the native helper process. However, in order to avoid unintended surprise licensing consequences, some organizations prohibit the use of GPLv3 software in any capacity. It's a shame that this software could not be used in such environments.

Food for thought.

[davidchisnall]

This also means that it can never be added to the Safari Extensions Gallery, which prevents Safari from being able to auto-update it. It would be nice if it used a more friendly license.

[samdeane]

I wouldn't have a problem with making it more permissive, but since it was @blahgeek who created the project and set the original license, I guess we should ask if they would be ok with it?

[davidchisnall]

Yes, you can't change the license without permission of all of the copyright holders (which means everyone who has committed nontrivial patches, in projects that do not require copyright assignment).

[blahgeek]

Hi everyone,

I originally created this project almost one year ago as a quick weekend project and frankly did not expected it to be this popular. Actually, the choice of the license (GPLv3) I made had no particular reasons. Also since I've moved from macOS to Linux, I don't think I would continue to contribute to this project in near future (big thanks to @samdeane for keeping this project alive!), there's no reason for me to keep the old license.

So, anyway, I'm ok to change the license. Personally I would go for MIT, but it doesn't has to be.

I took a look at the contributor graph (https://github.com/Safari-FIDO-U2F/Safari-FIDO-U2F/graphs/contributors), it seems that patches provided by those other than me and @samdeane are quite trivial (no more than 10 locs).

[samdeane]

We may as well ask @francislavoie @superdave and @xlc, but in the absence of any strong objections, let's go for MIT.

Has anyone checked what the licensing status of the dependencies is? Would we have a problem distributing a binary that includes statically linked versions of them?

[francislavoie]

I'm definitely not the right person to ask about any licensing specifics... Also I literally only contributed like 10 chars, I don't think that really qualifies me to have a say in this 😛

[xlc]

I am happy with MIT

[darconeous]

MIT would be fantastic.

[darconeous]

Since there seems to be consensus, any idea on the timeline for this change?

[samdeane]

Resolved in commit 732ad60.