Official Pelican + Nova collab

[purejosh]

I've recently invested in Nova, a Pterodactyl frontend theme, which does waaay more than a theme could ever really hope for, and I've been loving it. It actually has the potential to completely replace ptero's panel, and it honestly should. However, I've been told by the dev that they cannot support Pelican, due to the licensing requirement from Pelican that would force Nova to open source its code.

Is this true? I know Pelican is still beta, but once it surpasses ptero in stability and updates, it'll be the go-to choice for anyone running ptero. It would be incredible if, at least one day, Pelican + Nova could be possible. I'm not sure if you guys can work out some sort of deal, or if you plan on changing your license restrictions. But Nova is incredible, and worth x4 its price, easily. It gets better every month, the dev has been hard at work with new features and updates.

Pelican is definitely the future, compared to ptero, and Nova is an incredible front end. It would be unfortunate to let that opportunity get missed.

[purejosh]

If this has already been discussed publicly, forgive me. I didn't find any traces during my search, but I only poked for a minute or two.

[rmartinoscar]

Hey plugins & themes are not concerned by the license

[purejosh]

Thanks for the reply! Could you explain this in a little more detail? You're saying that plugin and theme creators are not required to open source their code to interoperate with Pelican's side of things?

Nova, as amazing as it is, has patched/overwritten many things about Pterodactyl, and rightfully so. That's not a concern from the Pelican team's perspective?

[Boy132]

Taken from Discord:

The Pelican Panel has been relicensed to AGPLv3. Wings still uses MIT.

This license change does only affect you if you meet all of the following requirements:

1. You modified the Pelican panel source files.
2. These modifications are not open source.
3. Your modified panel is publicly available. (Note: People who are family, friends, and acquaintances are not the public)

If you meet all of the above requirements you need a commercial license.
Please note that the usage or development of plugins/ themes does not require a commercial license.

You can find more detailed information about the new license in this blog post: https://pelican.dev/blog/relicensing-pelican-to-agpl

So what the devs said is only partially true.

[purejosh]

Thanks for the reply. I'll break this down line by line:

1. Nova would definitely be modifying the Pelican frontend files, unless there was some interesting way that the Nova dev could inject his changes without doing so. I don't see that being possible.
2. The modifications to the frontend files would likely be closed source, as his Nova theme is a paid product.
3. The modified panel being publicly available, does that mean the purchasers of Nova, using Pelican as a backend, would need to be publicly accessible? It would be hard to force every user to make their panel publicly accessible. It's not like Nova, or Pelican, could enforce such a thing. Though likely that it would be public, given that we're mostly server hosting companies in this space.

[purejosh]

Also, with that list, let's say both 1 and 2 are true. I've modified the Pelican frontend files, and they are not open source changes. But I'm a server host, and my panel is publicly accessible, assuming you sign up for an account and/or purchase a server from my store.

As I'm not in compliance with 1 and 2, but I am in compliance with 3, am I exempt from the commercial license? Is this commercial license meant to be against server hosting companies, or against the developer of Nova?

[Boy132]

You are confusing panel modifications with plugins.

Again, taken from Discord:

[purejosh]

Plugins and themes will be implemented in such a way that won't require it to modify Pelican's core files. I was not aware of that.

So if a theme is designed in the way that Pelican intends (future infrastructure required, ofc), there'd be no need to worry about modifications to Pelican's code. That's interesting.

Though the blueprint bit is also another incredibly concerning aspect.

[lancepioch]

Pelican is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and we have no plans to change the license. Closing this older thread.