Why is there no licensing for this repo?

[Njasa2k]

Can Auto add a license for this repo? wouldn't that lead to some problem down the road especially with APIs?

[hd-x]

I agree. Not many would use the API without a license

[jasonmhead]

Automatic1111's web gui is great, but long term is a question as it has no explicit license.

It's free for all, has available code, is extensible, has no posted use restrictions - all great.
It looks and acts like open source, but isn't explicitly open
Does this pose a community risk?
People can always fork and develop their own versions, but the basis on which things are built isn't clear.

Is there reasons for not MIT or Apache licensing the repo?

As a community of users we could start in mass encouraging this.

[Njasa2k]

the ambiguity could be useful.

I don't think there's any ambiguity with not having license, maybe to people who use it but for everyone else, it's pretty straight forward.

[adamerose]

People can always fork and develop their own versions, but the basis on which things are built isn't clear.

That's not true. With no license this entire project is technically not allowed to be forked or even used at all.

It's also worth noting that having hundreds of PRs merged with no project license makes this project FUBAR from a legal standpoint, because all those PRs are also unlicensed so adding a license at this point would require getting permission or removing past contributions from many people.

Unfortunately I expect this project will stay in a state of legal limbo. I agree with ClashSAN that it provides value to a lot of people, and it seems like the owner and contributors all treat it as open source unofficially. I know I'll be using this personally even though it's technically illegal, but I would strongly recommend everyone to not fork or use this project for any commercial or official.

You'll get the wizards here on github thinking about license drama instead of features..

If it was MIT licensed from the start nobody would be talking about it

[jasonmhead]

Perhaps not "technically illegal" as the merge contributors have implicitly donated their work to the project, but the project just really couldn't be deployed without ambiguity to a cloud server for a commercial service etc.
But for direct private local computer use should be more or less ok if all the code is in the clear source wise.

The intent of the repo is clearly to be shared.

For commercial deployment other code bases would have to be used.

[adamerose]

The intent of the repo is clearly to be shared.

Yeah I agree that's probably true.

To be clear I don't think anyone is going to end up in legal trouble over using this project unless they build a large commercial product out of it. I don't want anyone reading this to get scared or refrain from using this for personal use. I'd even say for commercial work you're still very unlikely to get in trouble, but I could say the same thing about torrenting Photoshop and that's still illegal.

Perhaps not "technically illegal" ... But for direct private local computer use should be more or less ok

No, technically this project is not open source and nobody has any right to use the code in any way. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I've read a lot about this and can't think of any reason why using this code would be allowed.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license
https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

If you find software that doesn’t have a license, that generally means you have no permission from the creators of the software to use, modify, or share the software. Although a code host such as GitHub may allow you to view and fork the code, this does not imply that you are permitted to use, modify, or share the software for any purpose.

merge contributors have implicitly donated their work to the project

That's not true either. PRs are implicitly under the same license as the project they are submitted to (in this case unlicensed so no implied permissions at all). If you accept PRs without setting up a CLA (contributor license agreement), you must get permission from all contributors to change the license of your project to a less restrictive license. For example a GPL project that accepts PRs without a CLA would not be allowed to change to an MIT license without permission from every contributor.

I'm not a lawyer but I've read a lot about this because because I have my own open source projects and wanted to do things right. I'm not prepared to cite legal documents or case law, but you can find lots of discussion with a clear consensus:

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2611/when-folks-send-me-pull-requests-on-github-what-are-their-copyright-licensing-t
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2361/pull-request-ownership-who-owns-the-code-committed
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12405/what-are-the-implications-of-accepting-pull-requests-to-an-agplv3-project-under
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7533/can-i-relicense-my-own-gpl-code-into-apache-mit

[jasonmhead]

It could be said there difference between what github and others say, and what the actions of the repo owner and contributors say.
The de facto status vs technical status.
But it's true that the status of the project is nebulous enough to be not viable for serious public facing projects.

For a web ui with a clear license and a quality project:
https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI
MIT licensed + other

I installed the InvokeAI code, and it's impressive and pretty nice, if behind on things.
But that could be changed with more contributors :)
This would be the project to really seriously contribute to and use. Hopefully they can get catch up :)

[Gerschel]

We need this for obvious reasons.

[cooperdk]

If there is no license, GPL, CC-BY-SA, or anything, this repo is technically under full copyright and possibly not even allowed on Git.
It is not allowed to change the tiniest character in the code and usage would be by permission only.

So I totally agree with @Gerschel et al.

[Gerschel]

Read more here. #24
#24 (comment)
#24 (comment)

I am not posting this to call anyone out. Just as information that I have found. In my opinion, I can understand the challenge to implement a license, because you don't know the direction it could go, if it will bite you in the ass later, the difficulty/ability to choose a license after contributions.

#24 (comment)

I think we need to run a poll, have contributors that have merges applied, make a vote. They would have to agree that the vote becomes final. Others would have to agree to not contribute anymore until after a license has been put in place.

An interesting thought, does this mean that during that window of time, forks from this project can argue that they created derivative works in good faith that a license was choosen?

This other project is a fork, that applied the license on August 29th, during the time when Automatic1111 said that was the license he was going to use. https://github.com/Sygil-Dev/sygil-webui/blob/master/LICENSE

[cooperdk]

@cooperdk
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#5-license-grant-to-other-users

Terms of service never supersede law. Permission to distribute, use, and alter copyrighted works (in essence, everything with a clear copyright and everything with no clear licenser) is forbidden. No matter what any terms of service state. This is basic copyright law, which has its roots in international conventions.

[Gerschel]

@cooperdk I don't know how you misunderstood. All I did was answer your questions.

But you're required to submit a license to have software hosted on Github. That's how I understand it. Otherwise it's basically under copyright as previously mentioned, and that means that nobody is allowed to modify the code, meaning again that it might not be allowed to be hosted on github.

TOS states setting as public grants a License.
Copyright is owned by each contributor, no questions, they have not contributed under a contributors license.
You can absolutely modify the code according to the license Github required the repository use. TOS says "worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the Github Service", just hit the edit button on the file, and perform an edit.

[cooperdk]

Yes, and I wrote that terms of service do not supersede law. You cannot grant or determine anything in terms that interfere with law, and law says that any work not accompanied with a licence is under full copyright. If you submit any change to the software, you have edited the files, which is illegal when software is copyrighted.

[cvar66]

learn to read bro

[Gerschel]

I think this discussion is veering off from the main topic (topic of, can we get a license) and has a chance to get heated. I'm going to hold back from further discussion, I know they are closely related. I just don't want to become annoying with more posts, and let other folk who would know more, handle that part of the discussion. Thanks for discussing this with me.