No license found

[JacksonChen666]

This project does not seem to have a license declared in an obvious way, or at all. A license should be added (as this project seems to be intended as open source) so that users can run, modify, study, distribute, and use the code.

https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

[jorgesumle]

Unfortunately it's proprietary: "Copyright © 2023 Mastodon gGmbH".

It would be nice if someone created a free version.

[bovergaauw]

Unfortunately it's proprietary: "Copyright © 2023 Mastodon gGmbH".

Please be careful, a copyright notice does not make a work proprietary: The latest GPL starts with:

"GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007
Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. https://fsf.org/".

It's the license's terms that determine whether a work can be considered proprietary, open source or other.

[andypiper]

The Mastodon apps and server source code are GPL and AGPL v3 (see their separate repositories).

I am relatively new on the team, but I will look into getting a LICENSE added to the website source so that folks feel more confident in how their contributions are used. Thank you.

[shuvashish76]

Any updates?
(Duplicate #24)

[andypiper]

We determined that there was no urgent need to add a license to the joinmastodon website source as we do not expect it to be reused elsewhere. Again, the actual application code for the Mastodon server / web UI, and Android and iOS apps, is already licensed under OSI-approved licenses.

[shuvashish76]

As @TheLastProject mentioned no license means "proprietary" by default.
See Anti-Feature of Mastodon for F-Droid.

Without going through the long discussion here is the short reason.

[bovergaauw]

No license means "proprietary" by default, but the lack of a license document bundled with a piece of software does not mean there is no license defined for it elsewhere.

Edit: More precisely, no license terms means "proprietary" by default, but the lack of license terms bundled directly with a piece of software does not mean there are no license terms defined for it elsewhere.

[demode-root]

We determined that there was no urgent need to add a license to the joinmastodon website source as we do not expect it to be reused elsewhere.

There is no urgent need from a purely consumer side, but from a contributor and translator side it is quite important. I would also assume that for a project building social web FOSS licenses would be a priority number one.