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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

What is it with these Chat apps having strange and not-real open source licenses? OpenWebUI is the same. Is there something about these chat apps that seems to make them more prone to weird and strange licenses? Just opportunist?

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MIT core + "ee" (enterprise edition) commercially licensed extension subdirectory isn't that strange of a occurrence nowadays.

I also wouldn't pin it as chat app specific. Quite a few VC funded open core software has adopted that pattern post ~2020(?): cal.com, Dagster, Gitlab

Yea, the license is modeled after the Gitlab license. All of the core chat/RAG/agent logic is fully MIT, and >99% of deployments of Onyx are using the "community edition"!

Copilotkit is in the same boat. There are parts of the open source codebase that require an enterprise license to use. Basic things like "on error" handlers that are completely offline features. (They might have moved away from this, I haven't checked in a while)

If you tack on these faux-pen source VC licenses and complicate things, you're signaling dishonesty and dark patterns. It might not be the case, but it's not a good look imo. VCs don't seem to care, though - it's all about securing the future payoff, doesn't matter what principles or norms get trampled in the process, and it's only a small set of FOSS nerds that ever get bothered by it, anyway.

Thanks, lawyers, you make everything better!

New tech draws new people. New people have new ideas. Also for licenses.

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