[Developers] Acre hosted app licensing - BSD only?

[Stefano Mazzocchi]

Tom Morris wrote:
> The MQL licensing conversation recently made me think of a couple of
> other licensing issues that I've been wondering about.  The first
> concerns Acre.
> 
> There are a number of references to all Acre code being BSD licensed
> which make it sound like it's mandatory, not just a suggested or
> default thing (and something that all Metaweb staff does), but I
> haven't been able to find any place where this is actually mentioned
> in a legal (or even semi-legal) agreement.  Is there a separate
> license for freebaseapps.com or have the lawyers said that since the
> source code gets stored in the graph and graph is CC-BY licensed that
> the equivalent software license is BSD?

We are working on updating the terms of service right as we speak.

They will boil down to this:

1) your can host apps on Acre only if they are somehow using data from 
Freebase, this is *not* a general hosting service like Google App Engine 
and it's not designed to compete with one.

2) by using Acre, you agree that the source code of your app will be 
licensed under a BSD license automatically. You will also be allowed to 
upload code licensed under a BSD-compatible license like the MIT license 
or code under public domain (say jQuery), but nothing you can keep 
proprietary or prevent others to clone or fork your app.

The idea behind this requirements is that we want to maximize the 
ability for people to 'clone' other people's apps without having to care 
about licensing restrictions or without having to check every app and 
every one of their dependencies.

We've picked BSD for no other reason that we feel it strikes a balance 
between protection, simplicity and compatibility with the javascript 
library ecosystem that exists right now on the web and also didn't want 
a license that prevented people from taking code from Acre and use it in 
their own apps outside (this turns out to be especially useful would we 
decide to open source Acre or parts of it to allow others to run apps 
with their own resources instead of Metaweb's)

NOTE: this is not a mandate from our lawyers (there is no such thing as 
'code license equivalent to CC-BY'), but a very explicit decision on our 
part to maximize the velocity of code in the app development environment.

I hope this clarifies things, but if not, I'll be happy to answer any 
other question you have on this (as it also helps me write the FAQ 
answer later ;-)

> Similarly, there's a mention in one of the FAQs (don't have the
> reference at hand at the moment) about Acre hosting being restricted
> to apps which access Freebase.com as stated in the TOS, but I can't
> find a ToS agreement anywhere, let alone one which says that.  As an
> aside, it would be great to have all such references linked directly
> to the relevant page.

They will: once the documents are ready (and the language approved by 
our lawyers) they will be linked in the right places.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi                              Application Catalyst
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.                      stefano at metaweb.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------