Siplicity is licensed under the Fair Core License. This means that licensed users receive access to Siplicity’s source code and can modify the application and distribute those modifications for use by other licensed users.
It also means that Siplicity’s code automatically transitions to open source (Apache 2.0) after two years.
This week marks the second anniversary of Siplicity’s first commits (which coincided with a very early demo I gave during the iPRES 2024 conference) and those commits are now open source.
I’m publishing this code at https://github.com/sipli-city/siplicity-foss.
The siplicity-foss repository is automatically synced with the main Siplicity repository, publishing two year old changes from the main branch using Github actions.
The sync process is quite simple. In Siplicity’s main repository I have a Github workflow that runs daily, checks for the latest commit after the two year embargo, and then merges it to a “siplicity-foss” branch if there are new commits.
The guts of this workflow are:
target_commit=$(git rev-list -n 1 --before="729 days ago" main)
latest_merged=$(git rev-parse siplicity-foss)
if [[ -z "$target_commit" || "$target_commit" == "$latest_merged" ]]; then
echo "Nothing to commit today"
exit 0
fi
git checkout siplicity-foss
git merge $target_commit
There’s another Github workflow that runs daily in the siplicity-foss repository. It is even simpler and just tries to merge the “siplicity-foss” branch into its own main branch.
You can view this workflow here: https://github.com/sipli-city/siplicity-foss/blob/main/.github/workflows/fetch-changes.yml.
I’ve gone with this licensing model for a few reasons:
It’s also a bit of an experiment. To see if this sort of model is viable for sustaining open-ish software for the digital preservation community.
We’ll see!