[Labs-l] Questions regarding the Labs Terms of use

[Ryan Lane]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Ricordisamoa <ricordisamoa at openmailbox.org>
wrote:

> From https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Labs_Terms_of_use
> (verbatim): "Do not use or install any software unless the software is
> licensed under an Open Source license".
> What about tools and services made up of software themselves? Do they have
> to be Open Source?
> Strictly speaking, do the Terms of use require that all code be made
> available to the public?
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
As the person who wrote the initial terms and included this I can speak to
the spirit of the term (I'm not a lawyer, so I won't try to go into any
legal issues).

I created Labs with the intent that it could be used as a mechanism to fork
the projects as a whole, if necessary. A means to this end was including
non-WMF employees in the process of infrastructure operations (which is
outside the goals of the tools project in Labs). Tools/services that are
can't be distributed publicly harm that goal. Tools/services that aren't
open source completely break that goal. It's fine if you wish to not
maintain the code in a public git repo, but if another tool maintainer
wishes to publish your code, there should be nothing blocking that.

Depending on external closed source services is a debatable topic. I know
in the past we've decided to allow it. It goes against the spirit of the
project, but it doesn't require us to distribute close sourced software in
the case of a fork.

My personal opinion is that your code should be in a public repository to
encourage collaboration. As the terms are written, though, your code is
required to be open source, and any libraries it depends on must be as well.

- Ryan
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