Clarity/notes regarding the project license

[ssddanbrown]

Hello,

I'm interested in open source licensing and, after looking over the project, just wanted to raise and query a few things I noticed:

• The License section of your readme makes no mention that other licenses are at play in the project, which could leave some users assuming the is MIT licensed alone.
• The license badge in your readme is broken, likely because GitHub/Shields no longer sees the license file as a typical known/MIT license file.
• In regard to the license file itself, it may be better to remove the "MIT License" header since it's no longer just MIT with that addition, and someone may just read that and assume standard MIT. Alternatively, the custom addition could be moved to the top.
• To understand the existing license terms following the license text, you have to scan the project for license files which is a bit of a pain, especially as there only seems to actually be a single other license? Might be a better just to directly reference that folder and license.
• Based on a quick search there seems to be a good few references on the ee code from the open code, indicating the ee code is relied upon to run/build the application. If so then users looking to use this as an open source project may be unknowingly using code under your "Novu Proprietary Software License" and therefore unknowingly agreeing to the terms of that license.

[linear]

NV-4563 Clarity/notes regarding the project license

[scopsy]

Hi @ssddanbrown thank you so much for the feedback on this. I completely agree with your findings. I have already updated the Readme License section and working with the team to update the main License file to avoid confusion.

I'm also looking for a solution for the "ee" references in the web package, but this might require some more technical research on our side.

I will update this thread with any progress made 🙏

[insidesmart]

nice work novu team on the release of v2. product looks very powerful now.

excellent findings/feedback @ssddanbrown on this topic.

just want to chime in another feedback reg opensource / ee offering. it would be very useful to have a webpage (maybe linked from pricing page) to compare the feature set of opensource vs enterprise versions. It would actually help any decision maker to quickly opt for enterprise version, if they badly need an important feature present only in it.

wish novu team good luck for the future.

[scopsy]

Updated the license files at the root of the project to better reflect the dual-license, and also added an updated licensee section on the readme.md.

@insidesmart will share this with you shortly

[ssddanbrown]

@scopsy Just wanted to say thanks for your positive reception and efforts made so far on this. I've gotten used to just being ignored and/or receiving excuses when raising these kinds of concerns with established projects, so it's good to see progress and intent to address these kinds of issues.

I'm also looking for a solution for the "ee" references in the web package, but this might require some more technical research on our side.

Yeah, that can be tricky. I don't have any examples to hand, but I feel like I've seen some projects that dynamically use/load enterprise modules depending on an env option, and some projects that effectively stub modules in the open offerings so that the same modules exist but are effectively swapped out depending on build type.

[arlogilbert]

There is no such thing as unknowingly agreeing to a license. If it is buried in the repo as I too discovered, it'd be pretty tough to enforce. Up until the moment that the MIT license is taken down and replaced with a license that describes the usage accurately in a single file, this is effectively MIT.