Questionable License Guidance

Software licenses can be long, boring, difficult to read, and tricky to fully understand without being a legal expert. Unfortunately some projects will attempt take advantage of this to mislead users in regard to their requirements, in ways which often have some kind of business benefit.

This tends to be more common in copyleft licenses where the license text is longer and more complex, as they’re harder to understand and often leave more room for ambiguity to be abused. The AGPLv3 is very commonly misunderstood and/or misrepresented due to its popularity in more complex mixed-license SASS environments.

Common examples of misleading guidance include:

• Changing license text while keeping the same license name.
• Stating that terms for past distributed software can change (or have changed) at any time.
• (A)GPLv3: Adding custom non-compatible license terms.
• (A)GPLv3: Stating generally the code must remain open (when requirements depend on specific distribution means).
• (A)GPLv3: Stretching the interpretation of allowed added terms to require specific branding to be retained.

Generally speaking, if a project provides license guidance expressing limitations, followed by a link to a sales page for an alternative license, then that’s a good time to be suspicious.