Licensing refinements

[Péter Szilágyi]

Hi all,

  After pondering about this for the better half of this year, I've finally decided to refine the original licensing of Iris a bit. The new scheme represents the same goals the initial license set out to enforce, but closes up some inconsistencies/loopholes.

  Up until this point Iris was licensed under the GLPv3. I haven't really given much thought about how to license it originally as it was a research only project. My goals with the GPL were to prevent people from abusing the effort put behind it. Unfortunately - as someone warned me at one point or another - since Iris is a service infrastructural component, GPL essentially meant free-for-all.

  I had hoped that someone might find the project useful enough to step up as an official backer, so I kept on working on it full time unemployed for over a year, hoping for the best. Although the project has been valued at hundreds of thousands, nobody took it upon themselves to try and support its ongoing development. As the projects viability in these circumstances is zero, I've decided to refine the licensing terms, resulting in one that respects the original dream, but prevents abuse.

  For today onward, Iris is licensed as such:

• Community license: for open source projects and services, Iris is free to use, redistribute and/or modify under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3, or (at your option) any later version.
• Evaluation license: you are free to privately evaluate Iris without adhering to either of the community or commercial licenses for as long as you like, however you are not permitted to publicly release any software or service built on top of it without a valid license.
• Commercial license: for commercial and/or closed source projects and services, the Iris cloud messaging system may be used in accordance with the terms and conditions contained in an individually negotiated signed written agreement between you and the author(s).

  The most notable change is swapping out the original GPLv3 in preference to AGPLv3. The rationale behind the choice being, that I expect anyone using Iris to respect the effort put behind it.

All the best,

  Peter