Interesting. They mention the following as some of their reasoning for this license:
> They market these rebranded solutions in commercial offerings to customers and organizations, sometimes at a massive markup.
> In some cases, they even go further by intentionally obscuring the fact that Open WebUI is available for free, so that they can charge unsuspecting users outrageous fees for something that should be accessible to everyone.
But that makes me think - if they really cared about this being free, they could have dealt with it by just using AGPLv3 coupled with enforcing their trademark, right?
Yeah if they only cared about misuse of their brand they need only enforce their trademark. But they're also arguing the other way and don't want anyone to strip their brand from their forks either:
> bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back.
Contradicting their original BSD License which welcomes anyone freely using, sharing and building on OSS software, even commercial forks. So now its a custom BSD-based license but with the aim of preventing competitive forks.
Realistically, how does an open source project enforce a trademark, when that carries a high cost (lawyers)?
Said differently, which option (sue for trademark infringement, or for license violation) has a lower cost? (including damages)
Out of interest: They talk a lot about how they think/hope their license is not contradictory. Has anybody with legal expertise verified this?
Open-ish source is one thing, but an untested custom license is an issue in itself.
How is their restriction any less permissive than other OSI-approved licenses' attribution clauses?
They could have just used a GPL license.