License change from MIT to AGPL-3.0

At Cloudogu, we believe in digital sovereignty and the contribution that open source software makes to it. Since our foundation, we have deliberately and consciously focused on the open source development of our products.

In order to ensure that our developed software remains open source in the long term, we have decided to change our license after carefully weighing up the pros and cons. In the future, our LowOps Platform Cloudogu EcoSystem, our source code management tool SCM-Manager, as well as the GitOps Playground will be relicensed from MIT to the Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0-only).

Why are we taking this step?

"For us at Cloudogu, open source is an important pillar for the digital sovereignty of public authorities and companies. We are a maintainer of a huge number of our own open source solutions and an active contributor to many other well-known open source projects. We want our solutions to remain open source and accessible to everyone. That is why we are taking this step from a permissive license like the MIT to a copyleft license. With the AGPL-3.0, we continue to have a license certified by the Open Source Initiative, which also ensures that the freedoms of our customers and our community are preserved."
Thomas Grosser CEO of Cloudogu.

When selecting the new license, it was crucial that the new license does not restrict the use of our software, that it meets the strict criteria of an open source license and at the same time ensures that the software is not changed into a closed source solution. AGPL-3.0 was the perfect choice for this.

What will change for you as a user our software?

In a nutshell: Nothing at all.

Section 2 of AGPL-3.0 says "You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force."

AGPL-3.0 only imposes obligations if a derivative work is distributed or passed on. In this case, you must publish the derivative work under an open source license; publication as proprietary software is not possible.

You can read the full text of the AGPL-3.0 license here: link to license text.

When will the license change take effect?

There is no fixed date on which all our open source tools will be converted to AGPL-3.0. The license change will take place within the next version of the tools. For the GitOps Playground the change has already taken place.