I’ve been writing some nixos modules and sharing them on GitHub, but I’m not really sure how to license them. For example, a nixos module that deploys an existing open-source application, Friendica: GitHub - bmillwood/nixos-friendica: NixOS module for the Friendica social network
My inclination is to license the module like Friendica itself is licensed, which is under the AGPL. However, the GPL and AGPL are written within a framework of source code compiled into binaries, and NixOS modules don’t compile into binaries in a very obvious sense.
What do we think constitutes a distribution of the compiled form of a NixOS module? Or is there no such thing, and GPL-family licenses are inapplicable? I feel like I can release pretty much anything under MIT / BSD style licenses, but it would be nice to know what my more aggressively copyleft options could be.
Since you’re the author, it seems right that you have the ability to apply whatever copyright to your contributions.
And yeah, a NixOS module seems more akin to a set of compilation flags or a sed script than it does to the compilation / shared library / network call paradigm that shows up in GNU libraries. But the integration of all the NixOS modules together into a system derivation does seem like “compilation”.
I am definitely not a lawyer, especially not a cross-jurisdictional one.
Nixpkgs has this in its license:
License
Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License.
Note: MIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.