chore: Restore unmodified MIT license

[evocateur]

This reverts #1616

I would like to apologize to the Lerna community for a number of things, so I guess I'll start at the beginning. Above all, I appreciate your patience as I make mistakes and learn how to become a better open source maintainer.

First, I apologize for making the rash decision to support the addition of an unenforceable clause to the project's MIT license. I failed to accurately assess the impact of this change, which led me to (incorrectly) focus on the intent. Despite the most noble of intentions, it is clear to me now that the impact of this change was almost 100% negative, with no appreciable progress toward the ostensible goal aside from rancorous sniping and harmful drama.

I am reverting the license changes. In the future, such changes (if any) will go through a much more thorough, completely public, and fair-minded process.

Second, I apologize for not enforcing the Code of Conduct in a consistent and timely fashion regarding the membership of James Kyle in the Lerna organization. Despite his numerous (and appreciated) contributions in the past, it has been very clear for quite some time now that he has decided to cease making constructive contributions to the Lerna codebase as well as actively and willfully disregarding the code of conduct that he himself added to the project.

Effective immediately, James Kyle has been removed from the GitHub org and will no longer have the privilege of making direct contributions to the source code.

Finally, I apologize to the community for not being a better communicator. I have done my best to be responsive to issues, but at the end of the day, larger concepts need longer explanations. Roadmaps need ...mapping? And so on. I would like to empower the community to contribute ideas and code that helps Lerna become the best monorepo manager it can be, and I can't do that by expecting strangers across the internet to read my mind.

To that end, I have created Lerna Log, a place to share patterns and explore the future of Lerna. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to improve the experience of using Lerna. The first post will include details of organizational changes intended to help avoid these kinds of incidents in the future.

Closes #1622
Closes #1618
Fixes #1619
Fixes #1626
Fixes #1631
Fixes #1630

[TheLarkInn]

Wonderfully said. We are in this together now as open source maintainers of other projects like webpack and babel, and you don't have to feel responsible for it all.

[Daniel15]

To that end, I have created Lerna Log, a place to share patterns and explore the future of Lerna.

@evocateur - This sounds great! Is it possible to host it directly on the Lerna site rather than on Medium? Medium have a paywall after you've read a few posts, which is pretty annoying 😕

[TheLarkInn]

I think this would be a perfect github issue to open with RFC. @Daniel15 would you be willing to create one weighing the options. For example webpack's pages are all accessible without a paywall. Babel does their own, and they have tradeoffs worth mentioning! 🙇

[stefanpenner]

@evocateur thank you for the thoughtful handling of the issue. Tricky situation!

[nickmccurdy]

@evocateur Thanks so much for your support, explanation, and professionalism. I'm sure this must have been stressful.

[hach-que]

@Daniel15 The paywall is only if the author opts into it explicitly for the story they are publishing, so this shouldn't be an issue.

[sarbbottam]

Thank you @evocateur and the lerna team!

[Daniel15]

The paywall is only if the author opts into it explicitly for the story they are publishing, so this shouldn't be an issue.

Ahh, interesting.

I still feel like it's better to own your own content, rather than some company hosting it on their domain. Anyways, I can create a separate issue for it 😃

[xtuc]

Thanks all 👏

[petermikitsh]

To echo others, thank you @evocateur.

More broadly, a trend of political activism within OSS is something I feel many, including myself, would prefer not to see. It's been a relatively recent trend to see companies warming up to the open source community and beginning to contribute back too. Many contributors to open source projects also support themselves with professional software careers, and use open source software as part of their work. Situations like today could have shaken the faith in the open source community and the bridge between private enterprises and public software.

No doubt a tricky situation, but we can't discount the significance of this decision to support truly free and open software.

[Sieabah]

There must be a god.

[elizagamedev]

@petermikitsh Open source is inherently political. Dissuading political activism is a political act that favors the status quo.

[Sieabah]

@elizagamedev Protesting has its purpose and place, changing the license of an open source project is not the place. It has absolutely nothing to do with the political message and everything to do with modifying the license to be MIT with a list of exclusions curated by a single biased person.

Regardless of the politics or the bias, on either side, open source is primarily open. What James did was not open and needed to be undone.

[nickmccurdy]

Additionally the OSI, the leading authority on maintaining open source licenses, does not allow licenses to restrict usage for ethical or political purposes. A license must be usable without restrictions, or it is not an open source license.

https://opensource.org/faq#evil

Can I stop "evil people" from using my program?
No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too.

We are not dissuading political activism, we are dissuading problematic maintainership of open source projects. The other Lerna maintainers are doing great. James can continue to be a political activist, but he should not refer to his projects as open source.

[tbredin]

Why can't you just protest the way the system you're protesting wants you to?

[Spotlightsrule]

Thank you for protecting the open source community by rolling back this harmful commit. This community does not need people violating licenses and free speech because it conflicts with their opinions or ideologies. Keep up the good work.

[Hurtak]

Exactly what parts of code of conduct did James Kyle broke?

[citypaul]

Thanks for the sanity @evocateur.

[PrinceMerluza]

Good result overall, this would serve as a precedent for similar issues in the future. Everyone should bookmark this or something.

[nickmccurdy]

@tbredin James' license change was legally flawed and would have not actually prevented those companies from using Lerna. There is a LernaOpenSource fork that was created which is legally usable by the blacklisted companies, but it's no longer necessary. Is it also strongly discouraged to use non-OSI-approved licenses in the open source community.

[TheLarkInn]

Before I go to bed for the night (last maintainer awake for now) 💤 😴 😂. I'm going to lock this thread so that it doesn't continue to escalate around ethical or political discourse. If there is anything unclear about the changes being made to the license, please feel free to submit it in a separate issue, but be wary of duplicates. Thank you everyone for being understanding, respectful, and thoughtful. 🙇