Forgejo is changing its license to a Copyleft license. This blog post will try to bring clarity about the impact to you, explain the motivation behind this change and answer some questions you might have.
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Developers who choose to publish their work under a copyleft license are excluded from participating in software that is published under a permissive license. That is at the opposite of the core values of the Forgejo project and in June 2023 it was decided to also accept copylefted contributions. A year later, in August 2024, the first pull request to take advantage of this opportunity was proposed and merged.
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Forgejo versions starting from v9.0 are now released under the GPL v3+ and earlier Forgejo versions, including v8.0 and v7.0 patch releases remain under the MIT license.
Yep, that’s the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they’d need the permission of all of the copyright holders who’ve contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.