I have a closed-source application I’d like to publish to Flathub, but I’m a little unsure about the license field.
There is no license for the application, and it’s really only closed-source to mitigate shady forks. Reading the publishing guidelines, it suggests that proprietary applications need to link to legal text… but there is no legal text for my application. I can certainly create a page with some thoughts an opinions on what people should do with it, but I’m not sure that’s really in the spirit of this metadata field.
If you would set no license, you would keep all rights to yourself, as the copyright holder of the software. Which would also mean that the user would, technically speaking, not even be allowed to use your software.
Therefore, a license is necessary.
Now, of course licenses are not an easy topic. There’s a reason they are often written by lawyers. They are legal contracts between you and the user.
Hmmm, that’s a fair point. At the end of the day this is not something I’m trying to make commercial or intend to defend in court (it’s just a tool for a videogame), so I suppose my opinion-based language would probably be fine.
If you don’t use LLMs (like me):
The Term of Service from WordPress.com are licensed under the CC-BY-SA. Of course, not all of it applies in that form to your application. But it could serve as a starting point for your own, like it was for Kreya.app.
