A usable open source license?

[wwahammy]

First off, I really love Zapier for everything I've used it for so far. Unfortunately, I don't like the license of this repo. Having a non-OSI approved license is really out of the norm for NPM packages. If we're going to run the code on our machines and we can see the code, what gain is there in preventing us for building on the code or reusing bits of it elsewhere? Is there any chance this license can be corrected?

[wwahammy]

At the very least, can the license of the example apps be under an OSI license? If you read the license in a conservative manner, if I take an example app template, and make an app out of it, it's not clear I can copy any of the code that I created into anything else I write. It also means I can't release my app under an open source license for the open source donation platform I use. That just doesn't seem like a good result for anyone.

[xavdid]

@wwahammy Thanks for this question! I've got an answer in two parts:

Firstly, I've run this by our legal team for clarification. We'll report back when they have an answer. As you can imagine, the license laid out at https://zapier.com/platform/tos is their purview.

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(everything in this section is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect Zapier's legal opinion; take it with a grain of salt)

Our license (as I understand it) doesn't restrict you from any of the activities you mentioned. There are definitely open source Zapier apps (such as this one) and I don't think there's an issue with them being funded.

I think the license is mostly meant to cover the fact that Zapier can run and modify your code on our end, and that you can't use the platform code to make your own competing platform.

But, that's just my layman's understanding. Given what I know about the process of putting this license in place, it's unlikely to change. But, you may be able to do the things you want under that license anyway.

I'm sorry if this is a dealbreaker for you!

[wwahammy]

@xavdid I'm a layperson as well. But if I apply the license as written, I struggle to see how I could use an example app template, make it open source and not risk violating your license is the code is run on something other than Zapier. That is, bafflingly, unless I base it on the Twitter example app which is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license (https://github.com/zapier/zapier-platform/blob/master/example-apps/oauth1-twitter/package.json)

If you could, at least just get the example apps to be clearly under an open source license, that would be immensely helpful at minimum.

[wwahammy]

Hi @xavdid. Has there been any update on this? We want to release a Zapier integration as open source so others can do lots of interesting things, including build on Zapier but the license is really concerning us.

[xavdid]

Hey @wwahammy! I'm no longer working at Zapier, so I can't speak to it anymore. I'm not sure who gets notifications on issues these days, but going through https://developer.zapier.com/contact is probably the best way to get an answer here. Good luck!