Re-licencing Pulsar

[Daeraxa]

I want to preface this by saying I'm not advocating for this one way or the other but it is almost an inevitable conversation so thought it would be worth discussing it early.

Currently Pulsar is licenced as MIT as inherited from Atom which is obviously one of the most permissive licences out there and really doesn't have any restrictions. This makes perfect sense for node packages, libraries and when big companies want to open source a project as it will allow them to do whatever they like down the line if they decide to close it.

However for projects like this does it make sense? It isn't like Pulsar itself would be integrated into another product and there is no large company behind it so I can see the justification in using something more restrictive like GPL or MPL where any forks would need to disclose their source code so that the original project could still benefit.

Now Pulsar does have its complexities, for example would it just be the core editor and core packages that get re-licenced but leave the other repo packages as MIT?

If nothing else I think it is useful to have the conversation so we can at least point people to it if it comes up in the future.

By way of comparison, a list of other editors sorted by permissiveness:

• Kakoune - The Unlicense
• Brackets - MIT
• LiteXL - MIT
• VSCode - MIT (except the binaries)
• Lapce - Apache 2.0
• Helix - MPL
• CudaText - MPL
• Kate - LGPL/GPL
• Vim - GPL compatible
• Neovim - Apache 2.0 (+ Vim's GPL)
• Geany - GPL 2.0
• Emacs - GPL 3.0 (duh...)
• TextMate - GPL 3.0
• Notepad++ - GPL 3.0

[confused-Techie]

Personally I prefer using MIT licensing. I know it means someone in the future could essentially close source further progression, but I like the open-ness. It's basically here is our code, and do whatever you want, which I feel is in line with a lot of our other values. But is a good idea to bring up

[sertonix]

It may not be on topic but it is related.
On some repository the license is set to MIT in the package.json but there is no license file. Should we add it there?
Also any preference of LICENSE vs. LICENSE.md?

[sertonix]

Ok, now I see potential for less files. If license is already defined top level (with the same content) can we remove it?

[Daeraxa]

Any that are identical, yes, I was planning to re-do this to remove any of the GH/Atom ones but there are a bunch with additional attributions which need to be maintained.

[sertonix]

There was a discussion on this before as I still have a PR that I reverted and haven't gone back to where I re-licenced all the packages internal to the pulsar repo. Basically there is no need to licence anything that doesn't have one as it will be covered by the project level licence.

Now I a not sure anymore if you mean the same I mean. I mean packages that are in there own repository. eg. command-palette

[Spiker985]

There was a discussion on this before as I still have a PR that I reverted and haven't gone back to where I re-licenced all the packages internal to the pulsar repo. Basically there is no need to licence anything that doesn't have one as it will be covered by the project level licence.

Now I a not sure anymore if you mean the same I mean. I mean packages that are in there own repository. eg. command-palette

Basically, any repo which doesn't have a license.md, should receive inherit the .github license.md

Any repo which has a license.md, which matches the .github license, can be removed

Any repo that has a license.md, which does NOT match the .github license, should remain as it was - or at least be evaluated

[sertonix]

Ok, but where is the org license? I don't see it in .github.