Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor based on Wlroots, designed to be highly customizable without sacrificing aesthetics. It offers a high degree of customization, includes all the desired eye candy, features the most powerful plugins, offers easy IPC (Inter-Process Communication), and provides more quality-of-life improvements than other Wlroots-based compositors.
Those feature sets quickly boosted its popularity, making it a favorite window compositor among tiling enthusiasts. However, this surge in popularity has sparked concerns for the software’s lead developer, as evident from a PR shared on the project’s GitHub page.
Hyprland is growing in popularity and I want to make sure no big entities try to f*** us over like Apple did with BSD. GPL is too restrictive.
For those unfamiliar, Apple has utilized BSD extensively, particularly its Unix implementation, in the development of macOS (previously Mac OS X). This relationship began in the late 1990s and continues to this day.
In addition, the developer underlines:
Basically, I will never make this closed source, but I want the rights to at one point say “commercial usage only under some conditions under certain terms”
To summarize, the goal is to protect the project from potential exploitation by large entities without adopting the restrictions of licenses like GPL, ensuring Hyprland remains open-source while allowing the project owner to set terms for commercial use under certain conditions.
Currently, Hyprland is distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license, an updated version of the original BSD license. It is a permissive free software license that imposes minimal restrictions on how software can be redistributed.
The license is OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved and is considered to be both business-friendly and open-source friendly. It provides a good balance between open collaboration and allowing for proprietary adaptations of the software.
In conclusion, the Hyprland’s licensing policy is about to change. However, whether this is necessary remains a moot point. Rest assured, we will monitor the situation closely and provide updates as needed.
Making doctors do “ethical medicine training” hasn’t stopped the medical blackmarket one bit.
Making AI developers take ethical training won’t stop unethical practices with AI one bit.
Switching licenses won’t stop businesses just taking your source code as a base, editing it so much you cannot recognise it, and producing their own closed sourced tool which you’ll never know existed, and they’ll make millions off it!