Metamask-extension: Invalid license change merged recently

[jameshilliard]

I noticed that a license change to a proprietary license was recently merged, however unlike the MIT license this proprietary license is very obviously incompatible with a project like this that is effectively GPLv3 licensed due to containing dependencies such as abi-decoder that are GPLv3 only.

[jameshilliard]

There's probably another issue preventing re-licensing to proprietary, the apparently copyleft Share-alike part of the original license appears to have been improperly removed in #3275 as removal appears to require an approval from the Ethereum Foundation per #886, in addition agreements from all prior contributors to that change may also be required for removal of the Share-alike clause. In general a Share-alike clause would prevent re-licensing of a project to a different license, see wiki page here.

[rekmarks]

Hi, thank you for bringing this to our attention. To recap the two arguments you made here to claim that our new license is invalid:

1. The MetaMask extension has one or more dependencies subject to a GPL 3.0 license
2. A previous version of the MetaMask extension was licensed under an MIT license with a share-alike provision, and we did not properly transition from that license to a pure MIT license

We address these as follows:

1. We had a single dependency, abi-decoder, that is subject to a GPL 3.0 license. This dependency will be removed in #9290, which will be merged before the next release of the MetaMask extension. _Edit: #9290 was merged._
2. This was a discrepancy in the description of the license. As you know, the actual license is established by the body of the license. While the term “share-alike” appears in the header of our pre-2018 license, the body of the license is verbatim the MIT license terms. Therefore, the MetaMask extension was only ever subject to an MIT license, without any share-alike requirement.

Like many open-source projects, we originally chose the MIT license because of its permissiveness. It enables anyone, including ourselves, to subject new contributions to our code to a less permissive license, which we have done to ensure our financial sustainability and continued existence.

Thank you for your feedback. We will now close this issue.