JsonPatch.Net going commercial and affect on commercial products using aspire - no affect 😀

[Meir Blachman (Meir017)]

https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/blob/3f152817bbc8e2aafcaf5078b23aa9a2f5d34d4d/src/Aspire.Hosting/Aspire.Hosting.csproj#L55 is aspire affected by thr license change of https://github.com/json-everything/json-everything/blob/8c3a9df97b3906aa2bf364347affd4fc483f090c/README.md ?

See https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1ql41jb/jsoneverything_to_start_charging_a_maintainance/

My concern here is that aspire itself is completely open-source, but users of aspire will be getting the JsonPatch.Net dependency, and many users of aspire are building internal apps for profit

[Damian Edwards (DamianEdwards)]

Meir Blachman (@Meir017) my understanding is that in the case of the OSMF EULA it only applies to the projects explicitly taking the dependency (so in this case it would potentially apply to Aspire itself) and not down-level consumers. Here is that point being made by Rob Mensching (@robmen) (the creator of the license) himself: https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1ql41jb/comment/o1ir7h5/

[Rob Mensching (robmen)]

damienedwards is correct. You only pay fees to dependencies you chose to use.

The goal is for Aspire to support its choice of dependencies. The goal is NOT to make other people support Aspire's choice of dependencies. 😄

Happy to provide additional clarification if I've done poorly above. :)

[Jose Perez Rodriguez (joperezr)]

Thanks for confirming this, Rob Mensching (@robmen). Is the intent to make this point clearer in the License? I see you also talked about this in the FAQ section, but I don't see this spelled out in the License itself, unless I'm missing something.

[Rob Mensching (robmen)]

My understanding (note: I am not a lawyer) is that the OSMF EULA already says that the maintenance fee is paid by the user of the project. The FAQ is how non-lawyers would say it. :)

[Damian Edwards (DamianEdwards)]

I think the confusion is that the EULA doesn't define "user" as clearly as the FAQ does.

[Rob Mensching (robmen)]

Also, I wouldn't say that JsonPatch.Net is "going commercial".

Unlike many other solutions, under the Open Source Maintenance Fee (OSMF), the license of the JsonPatch.Net project remains the same: MIT. It's still a fully Open Source project; source code access, modification, and redistribution rights are unchanged. The OSMF EULA applies only a small fee for using the binary releases to support its sustainability.

The term "going commercial" implies a loss of freedom that has not occurred.

[Leon Grave (SierraNL)]

This is pretty tricky, large companies use things like JFrog's Curation feature to specify opensource licenses that are allowed to be used.
Now JsonPatch.net needs to be whitelisted from this because it's ok to use it transiently via Aspire, but nothing will block a team to directly use this.

[Damian Edwards (DamianEdwards)]

We removed our dependency on JsonPatch.Net in #19498 so the latest versions of Aspire are no longer impacted.