According to GNU GPL, any modifications to a software licensed under GPL should also be licensed as GPL by virtue of the license “viral” nature.
Question: Is an addon a modification of Anki or is it an independent work that can have proprietary license?
According to the Terms and Conditions page:
As add-ons extend the computer version, they must be licensed under the AGPL3 or a compatible license. If you do not explicitly state a license, it will be assumed to be AGPL3.
Ok. Any opinion with what’s going on with Anki and AMBOSS? How does it affect the licensing of the latter as Anki is under AGPL3?
I don’t have a definite answer as I’m not knowledgeable about licensing, but I think AMBOSS is in the clear as its source is available?
Maybe this touches on the same topic that was raised on the reddit earlier, about the new AnkiHub plugin.
In that case I assume they’re in the clear because the add-on itself should be freely available but you require a subscription to use the collaborative deck features.
But doesn’t AGPLv3 explicitly cover servers?
AFAIK, AGPL was intended to prevent people from modifying open source code, hosting it on a server, and failing to provide the modifications to others. That’s not what’s happening here - assuming the add-ons are being released under a compatible license, I do not believe they are breaking the license by making network connections to proprietary services.
BTW, I’m working on some minor modifications to the AMBOSS add-on and found out that the JS files are minified/obfuscated. I think this is against the AGPL if the original un-obfuscated files are not made available (I don’t think they currently are)?
IANAL, but my understanding is that they should be providing the original source.
