Add AGPL license

[Xeeynamo]

From the public announcement on Discord:

We've been progressing very far with the project and I started wondering what would be the best course of action to protect the work of existing and future contributors. I personally consider contributions to a decompilation project as creative work. Therefore it is my desire to protect this creative work from being re-claimed by other people. This is especially true in the light of the ability of modding the existing decompiled code and create derivative work.

I talked privately with the current most active contributors. And me, @sozud , @bismurphy and @joshlory so far agreed on pushing through the AGPLv3 license for all the decompiled code in sotn-decomp/src, excluding any third party code and decompiled code from the PSX SDK. But I've been wanting to ask all of you if you are fine your code to be licensed and protected under the AGPLv3 terms.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Xeeynamo/sotn-decomp/89686514916cabd0dd88ae0387f749a889c19e05/src/LICENSE

I put and all the contributors, which can be accessed to the page https://github.com/Xeeynamo/sotn-decomp/graphs/contributors . Again, this will work for existing and future contributors. In the license I put my full name as I will be responsible of any legality. And I understand not every contributor wants to disclose their identity. Please give an approval to my latest PR if you do not have any objection. If not, please write here publicly.

PS. I understand past contributors will either not see the message above or decide to ignore it. If I do not hear from anyone of the contributors for more than one week between those who did not interact with me or the server, I will still go ahead and apply the license. It is not in my intention to ignore past contributors. But I do not want contributors who have been inactive for months or years to be a blocker. Please do not mistake this as an act of malevolence.

[sozud]

It looks like you aren't excluding psxsdk

[sozud]

We can't relicense this

[Xeeynamo]

oopsie, I will exclude this folder too

[sozud]

src/saturn/lib should be excluded

[sozud]

The license doesn't match the tag you picked AGPL-3.0-only

[Xeeynamo]

adjusted and copied from https://spdx.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0-only.html

[KiritoDv]

I suggest you should do something like this n64decomp/mk64#474 since you need to every single one of the 30 contributors to accept the license change explicitly, and something personal, since this is a decomp i dont think that is the correct license, it should be cc0, ( If someone doesnt accept, you can't license its code )

[sozud]

it should be cc0

CC0 doesn't seem to be OSI approved so I wouldn't recommend it https://opensource.org/licenses

Edit: https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero

[sozud]

@sonicdcer What licenses are you willing to accept?

[sozud]

I figure I should explain more why I think AGPLv3 makes sense vs. CC0 since there's a number of decomp projects that have chosen it or are working on re-licensing to it.

https://github.com/sonicdcer/sf64?tab=CC0-1.0-1-ov-file#readme
n64decomp/mk64#474
https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64?tab=CC0-1.0-1-ov-file

AGPLv3 is a strong copyleft license which means that people must release their modifications to the source. This keeps the project maximally open to the community so everyone can benefit from those modifications.

AGPLv3 has a disclaimer of warranty, and limits liability, which protects the contributors.

AGPLv3 has a patent license, which protects users of the software from being sued for violating patents.

[sozud]

@ser-pounce @rossimo @frog404 Any issues with this change?

[ser-pounce]

@sozud all good, thanks for asking!

[rossimo]

I'm all good

[sozud]

Current status for ./src (the part we are trying to re-license) is the following. This list isn't perfect since it includes psxsdk, which we aren't trying to re-license at this time. Generated with git shortlog -n -s -- src

*  821  Luciano Ciccariello
*  382  bismurphy
*  290  sozud
   159  Alejandro Asenjo Nitti
*   49  Jonathan Hohle
*   38  Josh Lory
*   32  ser-pounce
*   21  SestrenExsis
*   16  SynaMax
*   14  Julien Augugliaro
*   12  Allison Mackenzie Johnson
*    8  Mark Street
*    8  Ross Squires
     5  frog404
     4  Tuomas Tynkkynen
*    3  NotExactlySiev
     2  piratesephiroth
     1  Javier Córdoba Romero
     1  MottZilla
     1  Rainchus
     1  smb123w64gb

@dezgeg @piratesephiroth @kpanicc @MottZilla @Rainchus @smb123w64gb Any issues with this change?

[kpanicc]

All good, thank you for asking!
@sozud

[frog404]

All good for me too 👌
I feel it was an eternity ago that I did my modest PRs... You people are doing an amazing job !
Thanks for that and have a great day

[dezgeg]

Fine by me

[smb123w64gb]

No issue here.

[Xeeynamo]

@sonicdcer I kindly ask you to provide your feedback. For legal purposes we need a public record here.

[sozud]

sonicdcer asked me to delete a previous version of this comment since it included some info that wasn't pertinent to the license discussion, so I am re-posting:

He requests that src/LICENSE be removed since the root directory LICENSE (full AGPLv3) is sufficient in his opinion. His concern is that explicitly naming individuals takes away from the group nature of the project.

[Max-Clark]

AGPL sounds great to me 👍

[sonicdcer]

I agree to license all my contributions to AGPLv3.

[Rainchus]

I agree to license my contributions with AGPLv3

[MottZilla]

@dezgeg @piratesephiroth @kpanicc @MottZilla @Rainchus @smb123w64gb Any issues with this change?

I have no issues with the change. License is fine.