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

[Pine W]

Question: are there heightened security or privacy risks posed by having
non-open-source code running in Labs?

Is anyone proactively auditing Labs software for open source compliance,
and if not, should this be done?

Pine
On Mar 13, 2015 10:52 AM, "Ryan Lane" <rlane32 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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