How does the licensing work for AFFiNE?

[ssddanbrown]

Hello 👋,
I queried this on Reddit but it never reached a clear answer, and that conversation meandered a bit, so I thought it be best to query this officially here with more detail/context.

I'm trying to understand if it's possible to use AFFiNE using open source code alone, without any required code using a non-OSD adhering license, which I'd expect would be possible since this is being portrayed as an open source application via the website/repo/marketing.

While most of this repo is under the MIT license, according to your license the packages/backend/server directory is provided under a different license.
This terms defined in this "EE" license wouldn't generally be considered open source, due to limitations put upon use, modification and distribution.

The license does have the following caveat:

This EE License applies only to the part of this Software that is not distributed as part of AFFiNE Community Edition (CE). Any part of this Software distributed as part of AFFiNE CE or is served client-side as an image, font, cascading stylesheet (CSS), file which produces or is compiled, arranged, augmented, or combined into client-side JavaScript, in whole or in part, is copyrighted under the MPL2.0 license.

So it's possible that some of this code (or even all of it) may be provided under the MPL2.0 license (which I assume to be the Mozilla Public License v2.0), but this is dependent on what is distributed in "AFFiNE Community Edition (CE)".

Based upon the above, my questions are as follows:

• Where can I find what's considered to officially be part of "AFFiNE Community Edition (CE)"?
• Can AFFiNE be ran from its (OSD adhering) open source code alone?
• Or have I misunderstood how this server package is used? and it's not actually required at all to run/use the core functions of AFFiNE?
  • Based on the Reddit conversation, is sounds like this is required but I've put this question here also in the even I've misunderstood.

I'm specifically stating "OSD adhering" since that's what many consider to be the definition of open source, but if you've defined your license and marketing based on some other definition that would be good to understand, and help add context to answers to my above queries.

[EYHN]

Hey @ssddanbrown, sorry for the late reply. I just had a discussion with our team members and came up with the following response to your question.

The LICENSE in the server part needs to be modified from MPL 2.0 to MIT. This should be our mistake.

• Where can I find what's considered to officially be part of "AFFiNE Community Edition (CE)"?

Folders other than packages/backend/server will be AFFiNE Community Edition (CE).
The folder packages/backend/server is not a part of AFFiNE, but a part of AFFiNE cloud.
And it's placed under the AFFiNE monorepo to speed up development.

• Can AFFiNE be ran from its (OSD adhering) open source code alone?

Yes, you can build and run AFFiNE from the open source code under OSD definition alone.
Binaries under the release page are built from the open source code under the OSD definition.

• Or have I misunderstood how this server package is used? and it's not actually required at all to run/use the core functions of AFFiNE?

• Based on the Reddit conversation, is sounds like this is required but I've put this question here also in the even I've misunderstood.

It's not required and it's an addon. You can still use AFFiNE offline without any issue.
But in this case, sync, collaboration features will not be available. You can connect your client to our AFFiNE cloud to enable these features.
Or alternatively, running proprietary server by yourself to enable these features under the EE terms.

[ssddanbrown]

@EYHN Okay, that makes sense, thanks for the response!

It might be best to completely remove that part of the license in regard to "AFFiNE Community Edition (CE)" if you no longer provide a clear specific offering under that exact name, since otherwise it'll be somewhat open to interpretation, and since this caveat doesn't really matter if nothing within that folder is part of the "AFFiNE Community Edition (CE)".

As you develop this, I think it's going to be important in how you make clear what's actually provided as open source or not. Just looking at the website or repo readme, it's hard to understand what parts are actually open source. As an example, on your website homepage, you have the text: Open-Source Code for Trust and Collaboration and then, directly below that: Free for individuals, commercial and team usage fees apply. which are somewhat somewhat contradictory.

In your Reddit post, you advertised it as a "notion & miro open source alternative" in the title, but then the thing you're actually linking to (docker setup), from what I can tell (by looking in the provided container) is directly running, and relying upon, your non-open-source (enterprise) code.

I respect your right to choose licensing which works best for you, but I also think transparency and clarity is important with these things to avoid users being burnt by thinking they're relying on something open source which actually isn't.