Licensing for ProperDocs?

[jimporter]

I hadn't been following all of what's been happening with MkDocs until recently, so I've been trying to catch up on what occurred. One thing that I found particularly concerning was how MkDocs 2.0 is currently being developed with no license, which effectively means that the license is "all rights reserved". I'm not sure what their license will end up being, but it could end up being a non-open-source license like BUSL.

As an occasional contributor to MkDocs, I can't say I'm happy about the possibility that some of my contributions could be incorporated into a non-open-source project. (It's perfectly legal, since MkDocs 1.x is BSD-2-Clause, but I think it's a bit inconsiderate.) With that in mind, is there anything ProperDocs should do to guarantee that this can't happen in the future?

This would probably mean using one of the GNU licenses. LGPL would likely be the best of the lot, so that plugin authors can still choose a permissive license like BSD/MIT. Relicensing under a copyleft license would prevent bad actors from benefiting from our work going forward, if nothing else. That's something I've been considering with many of my own projects as well.

Of course, this isn't my project so licensing is ultimately up to the maintainers. What does everyone think?

[Andre601]

Switching License is a can of worms we should avoid.
While I myself wouldn't mind moving to a license that guarantees the project to remain open source, including any derivatives made from it, such a move often requires the signing of a Client License Agreement, where all past and current contributors give their agreement to have their work be re-licensed.

And while most people probably would be fine with this, I know for a fact that Lovelydinosaur, original owner and License Holder of MkDocs, would have a problem with it.
It wouldn't be the first time.

One alternative that there may be, is double-licensing the project, keeping all original code under BSD, but license all changes made by us and contributors here under a different license.
But this would be a somewhat bad aproach I would say, especially if a license is picked that conflicts with the original in terms of rights and conditions.

Probs the easiest aproach, if not the best, is to add a new line to the license, stating any changes made from 2026 onwards on ProperDocs are our copyright and not lovelydinosaur.

Either way, this isn't an easy thing to do here and probs would require the consultation of an expert on that field, which I myself have no access to.

[jimporter]

One alternative that there may be, is double-licensing the project, keeping all original code under BSD, but license all changes made by us and contributors here under a different license.

This is roughly what I had in mind, and should be legally ok. That's how it would have to work anyway, since anyone in the world could download the current MkDocs source with its BSD license and use the code that way. (Even if you managed to get everyone to sign a CLA, I'm not sure you could revoke the old BSD license retroactively. That would be a legal quagmire for anyone using open source projects.)

The main thing I'm concerned about here is that if ProperDocs remains BSD-licensed for new changes, those changes could be incorporated into MkDocs 2.0, but depending on how MkDocs 2.0 is licensed, the reverse might not be true. (I know 2.0 is a non-compatible rewrite, but some of the changes could hypothetically be useful for ProperDocs anyway.) The nice thing to do would be to say, "We're all friends here," and allow changes to move back and forth between the projects. However, if everything was friendly, I suppose this fork wouldn't have been created in the first place.

Of course, none of this means that ProperDocs needs a new license. It depends on whether you and the other maintainers think the benefits of a stronger license outweigh the time it'll take to determine the legal implications.

(I'll also freely admit that some of this is due to my own biases. I'm tired of seeing people/companies take BSD/MIT-licensed code that was published for the common good, and then write a bunch of proprietary enhancements to make a profit, all while never contributing anything significant back upstream.)