As a developer, I am confused about the current state of the Magento license.

[damienwebdev]

Summary

I am confused by the current state of the Magento license.

On the one-hand, we have the License.txt in the root of the project indicating:

Grant of Copyright License. Licensor grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable license, for the duration of the copyright, to do the following:

         1. to reproduce the Original Work in copies, either alone or as part of a collective work;

         2. to translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange the Original Work, thereby creating derivative works ("Derivative Works") based upon the Original Work;

         3. to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate shall be licensed under this Open Software License;

         4. to perform the Original Work publicly; and

         5. to display the Original Work publicly. 

On the other hand, there are now files in the codebase that read:

/************************************************************************
 * Copyright 2024 Adobe
 * All Rights Reserved.
 *
 * NOTICE: All information contained herein is, and remains
 * the property of Adobe and its suppliers, if any. The intellectual
 * and technical concepts contained herein are proprietary to Adobe
 * and its suppliers and are protected by all applicable intellectual
 * property laws, including trade secret and copyright laws.
 * Dissemination of this information or reproduction of this material
 * is strictly forbidden unless prior written permission is obtained
 * from Adobe.
 * ***********************************************************************

Specifically:

Grant of Copyright License. Licensor grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable license, for the duration of the copyright, to ... distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate shall be licensed under this Open Software License;

Dissemination of this information or reproduction of this material is strictly forbidden unless prior written permission is obtained from Adobe.

These two statements are contradictory. Please clarify the current state of the license as applicable to the open source codebase.

Examples

1. License.txt
2. New Copyright Notice

Proposed solution

Please let me know which is behavior is correct, as they cannot simultaneously be correct given that they are logically opposed.

Release note

No response

Triage and priority

• Severity: S0 - Affects critical data or functionality and leaves users without workaround.
• Severity: S1 - Affects critical data or functionality and forces users to employ a workaround.
• Severity: S2 - Affects non-critical data or functionality and forces users to employ a workaround.
• Severity: S3 - Affects non-critical data or functionality and does not force users to employ a workaround.
• Severity: S4 - Affects aesthetics, professional look and feel, “quality” or “usability”.

[m2-assistant]

Hi @damienwebdev. Thank you for your report.
To speed up processing of this issue, make sure that the issue is reproducible on the vanilla Magento instance following Steps to reproduce.

• For more details, review the Magento Contributor Assistant documentation.
• Add a comment to assign the issue: @magento I am working on this
• To learn more about issue processing workflow, refer to the Code Contributions.

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[rhoerr]

Related:
#37631 (comment)
#39099 (comment)

[ihor-sviziev]

@sidolov, could you please reply? Will all these Adobe notices be removed from the Magento Open Source version?

[chernenm]

hi @ihor-sviziev, @damienwebdev, this notice was used by our Adobe internal team member by mistake, we will remove it asap.

[hostep]

@chernenm: it would help a lot if the new copyright format is being fully validated by your coding standards tool, right now it only checks for the first line and doesn't care what other lines follow. If this can be checked fully, this problem wouldn't have happened probably.
Also having some documentation being published about it for the non-Adobe contributors here on github would help significantly for people who don't know yet about this new format.

[engcom-Bravo]

Hi @damienwebdev,

Thanks for your reporting and collaboration.

Adobe Commerce Engineering team started working on this issue. We will reach out to you if we need more information and you will get notified once the issue is fixed. Please leave comments for any further questions.

Hence moving this issue to ON HOLD.

Thank you!