Let me try to state this again, more precisely, and without the word “viral”. Because I think that the licensing is clear, it’s just an open question how the OpenMRS community would want to behave in a particular situation.
- Someone suggested that we create an aggregation which has an AGPLv3 user interface (forked from Bahmni) and an MPL-HD backend (OpenMRS core and modules)
- If the OpenMRS community builds and releases this aggregation, that means releasing a product for which modifying the user interface would be subject to AGPLv3.
- So the question (not a legal one, but a political one) is: would we (the OpenMRS community) want to do this? Would we release an aggregate distribution in which one significant component (that we expect others would want to derive from) has a strong copyleft AGPLv3 license?
I feel like this question is perfectly clear (though the answer isn’t obvious), but it must not be as clear as I think it is…
I don’t know what the answer to that should be.
It’s worth saying that the original rationale for OpenMRS not choosing a Strong Copyleft license like AGPL was that we wanted to allow anyone (including for-profit companies) more freedom to extend OpenMRS (including with proprietary code). We figured this might lead to more overall contributions in the OpenMRS ecosystem. Over the course of this decade I don’t think we’ve seen much of this activity.
What we’re seeing here is that a for-profit company has actually built a UI on top of the OpenMRS platform, and done so with a stronger copyleft license, rather than a proprietary one. Which is basically the opposite of the situation we considered a decade ago.