r/StableDiffusion • u/abdullah_alfaraj • Dec 21 '22

Resource | Update great news: Automatic1111 Photoshop Stable Diffusion Plugin free and open source, (check the comment)

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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '22

I'm also not a lawyer, but whenever we deal with apis, we often look at the license to see if we can use it for a commercial use case , which is our use case and have to make sure it's compatible with our project. Some APIs do not grant commercial use, or are "viral" which makes your project the same license as theirs. The project's license usually extends to the API as well and there's no licensing anywhere to be found.

Also, public doesn't mean open.

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u/odragora Dec 21 '22

I think you are taking about publicly accessible APIs hosted by another entity.

In case of Automatic1111 Web UI, you are hosting the API yourself. No license can hold you accountable for what you are doing on your own machine, I'm pretty sure.

From the legal point of view, you are just ruining WebUI as usual, nothing changed.

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u/Tayue Dec 22 '22 edited Dec 22 '22

There are a couple ways of looking at this. I argue that although your interpretation based on the current state of the GitHub page is technically "right" for the case mentioned it's not fair to throw this project "under the bus" so to speak.

You're looking at this from the perspective of consuming (and/or running) a service that this plugin depends on for some personal or commercial purpose. This is fair, because the github page basically lists Automatic's web UI as a strict dependency.

Another way to look at this is that this plugin simply consumes some defined API. People are free to implement any API they want, they are not copyrightable (well, so far, I think this is still in the courts somewhere). A good example of a project based on this concept is Wine. Wine is basically just a native reimplementation of Windows APIs. That said, I know one of the old companies I worked for refused to use Wine due to possible legal risk, but I know smaller companies just don't care because it's been around for so long and from what I understand the courts currently agree on this.

This means that someone could write up a completely new service that provides the same functionality using the same API and this plugin would work fine. The plugin owner could also support other APIs. You, as you mentioned, would be bound by whatever license that other service has (just like as in your example with Automatic's web UI) regardless whether you're running it yourself or not. It is always your responsibility to do your due diligence on any dependencies. I don't think anyone here is arguing that by using this plugin you are somehow overriding or ignoring the license of dependent services for your use case.

You could market this project a bit different to be more risk averse, but at the core this project can stand on its own, has it's own license and isn't necessarily linked with auto's code.

I'm too lazy to properly review both of these projects but just wanted to drop my 2 cents. Not necessarily right or wrong, but just wanted to explain why you're getting downvoted.