That’s a valid legal question.

The AGPLv3 license applies to the repository as a whole (the software architecture, the visual logic blocks, the UI/UX, and the compiled system). The license is there to establish a rule: if someone takes this infrastructure, modifies it, and hosts it commercially for others, they are legally obligated to keep their modifications open-source.

That being said, I don’t harbor any illusions. I am well aware that in the real world, bad actors might just fork it, strip the license, and run a closed commercial service anyway. But having the AGPL in place is a statement of the project’s ethos and gives at least some baseline legal leverage if a larger corporation tries to blatantly rip it off.

Hi @curbstickle_lw, thank you for stepping in and for taking the time to actually look at the project instead of just auto-deleting it based on reports!

I did read the meta thread, and I completely understand the community’s frustration with closed-source, paid advertisements.

To be completely transparent about the two points you raised:

1. Yes, I just registered. I’ve been working solo on this project for the past year and was looking for a community that appreciates self-hosted alternatives to corporate SaaS platforms. Since the project is fully open-source (AGPL), completely free, and built specifically for self-hosting, I genuinely believed it aligned with the rules and the core ethos of Lemmy.
2. Federation Hub (share-by-default): The reason it connects by default is that it powers the core community features (like importing visual strategy templates from other users), rather than acting as stealth telemetry. But I want to emphasize that it is strictly privacy-by-design (no hostnames or IPs are ever stored), and anyone who wants a completely isolated, air-gapped instance can instantly disable it by setting IS_CENTRAL_HUB=true in their .env file.

I really appreciate you giving the project a fair look and making a distinction between actual open-source projects and corporate spam. I’ll gladly stick around to answer any technical questions!

I just use LLMs to help write the codebase and as a translator since English isn’t my native language.

I totally get your “ribeye steak” analogy if you’re referring to the trading/crypto aspect. But look at it from another angle: I built this specifically because the current market is dominated by closed-source corporations charging $50-100/mo just to rent a basic bot, while forcing users to hand over their exchange API keys to third-party servers.

Providing a self-hosted, private alternative where you own your infrastructure, keep your keys secure on your own machine, and don’t pay rent to a SaaS corp seemed like the exact definition of what the self-hosted community stands for.

Is the topic of financial/trading tools just completely off-limits here, even if it’s AGPL and self-hosted? Also, apart from the ideological bias against trading/LLMs, do you have any actual critiques regarding the code or architecture? I would gladly take them into consideration.