Clarify License

[KarlAmort]

The tagline at https://github.com/Glimpse/Home/issues/new currently reads

The open source diagnostics platform for the web

And the Readme states:

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct

...which states as its scope:

This code of conduct applies to all repos and communities for Microsoft-managed open source projects regardless of whether or not the repo explicitly calls out its use of this code.

The project is also listed at https://opensource.microsoft.com/?keyword=glimpse.

Yet the actual license at https://github.com/Glimpse/Home/blob/master/license.md (and, identically, in most of the other repositories) is not Open Source in any accepted definition of the term.

This is bound to create confusion, ill will, and/or legal headaches when people trust the tagline, or the mention of the Code of Conduct without explicitly checking the license, and you decide to turn this into a commercial product, or cancel the project, and especially when you're accepting pull requests from contributors thinking they're contributing to an open source project. In fact, I can expose myself to accusations of piracy with just one click, right here: The "Fork" button on the top right would immediately make me a distributer, which would be a breach of the current license.

Please consider changing the license if you want to continue developing this software within the OSS ecosystem. Until such time as that decision is made, you should remove the mention of "open source" from the organization's description, and add a prominent notice to each project's readme. Ideally, you should try to also find a way to communicate this to people installing the NPM package,

[avanderhoorn]

@MatthiasWinkelmann thanks for your feedback and questions. This is a reposting on my comment on HN and on the GitHub issue for coverage and for anyone else wondering at this point in time (as the answer is likely to evolve in the future).

I totally agree that having public code in a repo on github that has a proprietary license leads to headaches, hence why we haven't done that. If you take the time to have a look around the Glimpse org, all code that exists there, is under MIT/Apache2. No code associated with the Node project is yet publicly available on GitHub. Once you have looked, feel free correct me if you think something has slipped through. Given that everything is MIT/Apache2, there is no chance that someone could accidentally commit code to a repo that has a license that goes against the spirit of the community.

Regarding our use of the Open Source Code of Conduct, parts of the project, specifically the .Net components, are currently open source. Even though not all elements of the project are public, a large portion of the project is and we choose to operate under that code. For Glimpse/Home we have it mentioned there, not to confuse people, but rather to advise people the guidelines under which we are operating. If you have a chance to read through it, please feel free to reach out to me if you don't agree with what it states as it pertains to running a project.

To summarizes, the only repo under the Glimpse Org that is associated with the Node effort is Glimpse/Home and it has no code in it. All other public repos carries the MIT/Apache2 license. Glimpse/Home is our current best place for gathering feedback and is situated on Github since it is where the community is. It works given our future direction.

[josx]

it is confusing, there are plenty of people using it without knowing the licenses terms.

Also in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/@glimpse/glimpse page there is no hint about licensing, but you can read the tagline.