Skip to content
Whity docs

ADR 0014 — AGPL-3.0-only with a plugin linking exception; Commons Clause withdrawn

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-09-10
  • Deciders: Whity-Core maintainers
  • Related: ADR 0003 (supersedes its licensing sections — §4, §“Licence discrepancy”, and the Commons-Clause premise in §Option C), LICENSE, CLA.md, TRADEMARK.md, NOTICE

Context

Section titled “Context”

LICENSE carried a custom, unusually broad Commons Clause condition bolted onto the full text of AGPL-3.0. ADR 0003 already recorded that composer.json declared AGPL-3.0-only while LICENSE said otherwise, and flagged the discrepancy as needing correction. It was never corrected, and the problem is larger than a mismatched field.

The condition was self-contradictory. It forbade “any use … in connection with or to support any commercial, for-profit, or revenue-generating activities”, then twelve lines later permitted “internal business use”. Both cannot be true, and ambiguity in a licence is construed against the drafter.

It was probably unenforceable as written. AGPLv3 §7 permits a recipient to remove further restrictions imposed on top of the licence. Publishing the full AGPL text alongside an added restriction invites precisely that argument.

It was strategically backwards. It produced the adoption penalty of a proprietary licence and the disclosure exposure of copyleft, with the protection of neither: competitors could read everything, while the customers and integrators who would carry the project to market were forbidden from using it.

And it blocked the business model. The intended model is Odoo-shaped — a free core, first-party applications (some paid), and eventually third-party apps in a marketplace. That model has a hard prerequisite: a plugin author must be able to sell a closed-source plugin. Odoo licenses its Community framework LGPL, not GPL, for exactly this reason.

Two facts made a clean fix available:

  1. Sole copyright. git log shows one human author across all 1,572 commits; every other author is Dependabot or a GitHub Actions bot. The project can still be relicensed unilaterally — a property that disappears permanently on the first outside contribution.

  2. The boundary already exists. whity/plugin-sdk is a separate MIT package that “depends on nothing but PHP at runtime”. Plugins import only Whity\Sdk\*; core’s Response/Request are subclasses of the SDK’s, so a plugin never touches core types. The architecture was already built for this; the licence simply did not say so.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

1. Whity Core is AGPL-3.0-only. The Commons Clause is withdrawn in full. Commercial use is permitted on the AGPL’s terms.

2. Add the Whity Plugin Exception (LICENSE), an additional permission under AGPLv3 §7 — it grants rights and removes none, which is what §7 allows. A work that uses only interfaces published by the Plugin SDK, and does not incorporate core source, may be licensed on any terms its author chooses, including proprietary and commercial ones. Modified versions of Whity Core itself remain fully AGPL, §13 network clause included.

3. The plugin boundary is MIT on both sides. whity/plugin-sdk already was. The four published client packages — @amroksaleh/ui, @amroksaleh/features, @amroksaleh/api-client, @amroksaleh/tokens — were published to GitHub Packages declaring UNLICENSED, which grants no rights to anybody. They are now MIT. This was not cosmetic: downstream consumers, including Elmak, had no legal basis to use them, and no plugin author could have built a UI.

4. Add a CLA (CLA.md), signed by adding a line to CONTRIBUTORS.md. Contributors keep their copyright and grant permission to relicense. This is what preserves the ability to sell commercial exceptions.

5. Add a trademark policy (TRADEMARK.md). The code is free; the name is not. This is where commercial leverage actually lives once the licence is permissive — the same arrangement Linux, Mozilla, WordPress, Odoo and Grafana all use.

6. Add NOTICE, attributing third-party dependencies and recording the licence audit.

Consequences

Section titled “Consequences”

Adoption is unblocked. A company’s counsel can read LICENSE and reach a decision. Integrators and hosts may build businesses on Whity, which is the only known way a substrate reaches a market.

Paid plugins are legally sound, not merely “probably defensible”. That distinction matters: nobody funds a product on an unresolved derivative-work question.

Competitors may run Whity commercially. This is a real cost and it is accepted. AGPL §13 means a competitor offering a modified Whity as a service must publish their modifications, and the trademark means they cannot call it Whity. Those two together are the protection; the Commons Clause was not.

The CLA is now load-bearing and time-sensitive. It must be in place before the first outside contribution. Retrofitting requires the agreement of every past contributor, and one refusal blocks commercial relicensing permanently.

A future proprietary edition has one known constraint. sharp’s libvips binaries are LGPL-3.0-or-later. LGPL §4 permits bundling in a proprietary work only where the user can replace the library — satisfied today, since it is an ordinary npm dependency, but recorded in NOTICE so it is not rediscovered late.

ADR 0003’s licensing analysis is superseded. Its §4 and its “licence discrepancy” note both assumed AGPL + Commons Clause. The architectural conclusions in ADR 0003 are unaffected — indeed the MIT SDK it argued for is what makes this decision possible.

Alternatives considered

Section titled “Alternatives considered”

Keep the Commons Clause. Rejected: self-contradictory, probably strippable under §7, blocks the app ecosystem, and deters the exact audience needed.

Go LGPL, like Odoo Community. Rejected: LGPL permits a competitor to run a modified Whity as a closed SaaS with no obligation to share anything. AGPL’s §13 is the whole reason to prefer it for network software, and the plugin exception recovers the one property LGPL was wanted for.

Go permissive (MIT/Apache) throughout. Rejected: gives away the network clause for nothing in return at this stage.

Open-core: hold features back as proprietary. Not rejected, but not decided here. It remains available later — the CLA is what keeps it available. Note that gating SSO specifically is a well-known way to lose a community’s goodwill; branding removal, multi-company consolidation and compliance exports are the less contentious lines.

Not a lawyer

Section titled “Not a lawyer”

This ADR and the licence text it describes were drafted by the maintainer with AI assistance. The reasoning is sound as engineering; it is not legal advice. Have counsel review LICENSE, CLA.md and TRADEMARK.md before relying on them commercially — particularly the plugin exception’s wording, which is the clause a plugin author’s own lawyer will read most closely.