License-compatible HomeAssistant skill

Plugins & Skills Skill Suggestions - Votes Needed
1

The existing HomeAssistant skill, though I’m sure it contains a great deal of good work submitted by talented programmers, is licensed LGPL.

I and others have ranted to excess about why this is Bad with respect to Python. It might as well be GPL-licensed. And while nobody has ever been sued over it, I, for one, am GPL-cleanroomed. I don’t look at GPL code if it’s at all related to code I write myself. This is the same clean room principle that protected the GNU project during its earliest days, and which made it possible for IBM clones to exist in the first place.

Hence, the HomeAssistant skill stands out as a useful skill that I can’t touch. I hate to suggest starting over from scratch, but the skill almost definitely can’t be relicensed at this point. If it had started life as a MycroftAI skill, the CLA would cover that, but it didn’t, so it can’t, and here we are.

Anyone else have thoughts?

2

Just want to echo the sentiment, i never even looked at the HA skill for the same reason

if you are wondering why GPL is bad (for python), read the awesome write up from steve

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3

fork mozillas iot tool from way back and bring that skill back to life?

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4

This is something I am actively investigating. Currently looking to see what effort this would take. The Home Assistant Rest API is pretty straight forward so I think it is well within my capabilities to give it a go. Will report back once I have something working.
As far as licensing goes, Is there a license that the “community” would prefer for this new “from scratch” skill? my repo is currently set with a GPL-3.0 License but am open to whatever will advance this skill once it is working?

5

Apache, BSD, MIT

https://www.osscc.net/en/licenses.html#compatibility

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6

I agree with Jarbas. Permissive licenses are the most straightforward, and you never have to worry about down-the-road implications. The obvious tradeoff is only a tradeoff if the code you’re writing 1) stands a reasonable chance of being taken proprietary and the proprietary version might exceed your version, and 2) you care about the first thing =P

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7

so it is okay to create s/w based on an API definition,??
I kinda thought the API would be covered under the original license??
*edit VV
kind of ironic - here in the USA we are celebrating ’ freedom ’ and now
we are talking - restrictions, !

8

HomeAssistant isn’t the issue. The issue is that the original author of the HomeAssistant skill licensed the skill copyleft, and some of us steer clear of copyleft code in the same situations where we steer clear of proprietary code: when we work on similar code, and might therefore be accused of plagiarizing the restrictively-licensed stuff (even when the implementation is obvious.)

You can’t be accused of plagiarizing code you haven’t seen. That’s how GNU was made.

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