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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

"Licensed under the "Lightly-Modified Apache License", a variant of the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License."

So... the additional term is understandable, and sane. You don't want bad forks to break your server. Though it could've been largely left out of this: You could've simply stated that forks are not authorized to use the central server as terms of the server itself, and left the code under an approved open source license.

But the weird bit here is that the license file can only be used in accordance with obeying this software's license... does that mean that the "Lightly-Modified" Apache license is not, in itself, open source? Like, is this meant to read as "Nobody else may release their own software under this license"?

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This license is most definitely not Open Source.

The right place for this term is in the terms and conditions for using the hosted server provided by the project, rather than in a software license.

The particular topic I find interesting is whether or not they are trying to claim the license they're using can't be used by other software projects, which would be super weird. As if the license itself was the intellectual property they felt needed to be protected.

"you may not use this file except in compliance with the license" is part of the Apache License boilerplate: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#apply

Interesting. Did not know/notice that. ...Now I kinda wonder why that is.

It took me a few times of reading carefully to understand their intent. The wording itself is absolutely atrocious and far reaching in comparison.

Honestly, just leave out the default config and have a ToS on the hosted server instance itself. Or just ask for a few donations to pay for direct costs and disable relaying.

Hey everyone - thanks for bringing this up!

As some of you have deduced, the reason we added the extra clause was because we were concerned about supporting modified clients on our rendezvous server. We want to provide a good user experience for everyone using Tandem, and it would be difficult to do that by supporting modified clients as well. Like you pointed out, we don't want potentially bad forks to cause problems for others. The spirit of the license was not to stifle the abilities of others to contribute to or distribute Tandem.

With that said, we’ve heard your feedback and agree that this kind of stipulation is better suited for a terms of service on the server we host. So we’ll be switching to the unmodified Apache 2.0 license and adding a terms of service to request users of modified versions of Tandem to use their own hosted server.

From my point of view the term holds another problem. It sounds like you can't use/host the provided "Rendezvous Server" at all and must also write your own to connect the people.

I definitely don't read it that way. But I suppose that's part of the problem with writing your own license modifications: They may be open to interpretation, whereas most common licenses are already well-understood.

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