Licensing Question: Re website

Software Siril
1

Hi,

I’ve starting on building a website where it can do all your astrophotography processing in the cloud. I’ve previously done similar things for 3D graphics before with Threekit and Clara.io.

I was wondering about the licensing for Siril. I obviously need to have a backend that can do the pixel processing operations. It is a lot of work to write it from scratch and you’ve all done an amazing job with Siril. I think based on the license for Siril, I could run Siril in the cloud using command line tools and so forth to do the image processing and this wouldn’t violate the license? Of course any changes I make to the Siril set of tools, I can contribute back (I do a fair bit of open source work (bhouston (Ben Houston) · GitHub).

I am asking ahead of time to avoid a sticky situation in the future. With both Clara.io and Threekit, we leveraged Three.js as our 3D library and in the process contributed a ton back to it - over 200 PRs. That said, I think Siril is more mature than Three.js was when we started so I do not think that will be repeated.

That is my understanding. Can anyone confirm that I will be legally okay doing this?

Also if you are interested in following the progress of this new website, you can follow me on Twitter or Mastodon.

PS. Why is there no official Github or Gitlab repository for Siril? Honestly, having it on Github would encourage contributors more in my experience.

Best regards,
Ben Houston

2

Hello, Siril is on gitlab: FA / Siril · GitLab
Licensing is GPL3, I believe you can do what you are saying with it.

1 Like
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If your website is going to be a business then get a lawyer now to answer these questions for you.

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The only restrictions the GPL places are on redistribution - if you redistribute it yourself you must make the source code available, including to any changes you make to the software which must be under the same or a compatible licence. But there’s nothing stopping you using it to provide a service in the cloud. Under the GPL you don’t even have to make any customisations available under the GPL, the only licence I’m aware of that requires that is the Affero GPL.