As some of you following our Green Coding github have maybe noticed is that we have changed the license of some of our repositories.

The tools and the demo code where prior licensed under MIT, which is a software license that we have come to love through popular libraries like Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, Joplin and many more …

However we believe that our code is not seen as a library, but as a ready made and directly usable tool, that when remixed or integrated into a bigger product it shall still be absolutely free and open to anyone.

This is because it was specifically designed with the goal to make the energy usage of software visible and open to anyone. And not with the main goal of having the most adoption no matter how open-source and accessible the created tools are. That includes specifically the exact protocols and methods that where and will be used to create these measurements.

We believe this cannot be done with an MIT license as it enables actors to keep some part of the measurement software closed due to the mindset that this has any benefit for a monetary drive actor that may want to keep it’s methods a “company secret”.

We strongly believe that any code for the measurement of open data must be publicly available and free. If it will be at any point created from a non-open-source and therefore obscured software that uses for instance our previous MIT licensed code it has no value as it produces not falsifiable results.

Therefore we licensed our repositories containing the metrics tool and also the demo code under AGPLv3. This license guarantees, that as soon as the software is integrated or interacted with or even if somebody creates an API endpoint with it that outputs software energy measurements it MUST be released as AGPLv3 also to the community.