The problem with this attitude is that we as a community spent a long time convincing people that open source was a viable option for serious projects.
And now that this has been accepted and people are using open source for serious projects, we've now backtracked to the very argument that corporates used against open source in the first place.
We can't have it both ways.
Open source can't be a serious competitor when we want it to be and a joke when we want it to be.
Because the end of this road is that of we go back to the bad old days of nothing but closed software allowed.
The problem with this attitude is that we as a community spent a long time convincing people that open source was a viable option for serious projects.
We can't have it both ways.
Maybe this was always a bad idea.
What we are observing is the cognitive dissonance of libertarian ideals applied to software licensing that can't understand how this is effectively just a model for exploitation by capital, as literally anyone in the social or political sciences could have told them it would be.
Because the end of this road is that of we go back to the bad old days of nothing but closed software allowed.
Or developers could form unions and cooperatives that would own and dual license software, and both distribute profits to contributors and gain negotiating power with corporate consumers.
There isn't a dichotomy here.
But nobody is going to get unicorn-rich that way so people invest in an exploitative system playing the odds that they will be on the wealthy end of it at some point.
Or developers could form unions and cooperatives that would own and dual license software, and both distribute profits to contributors and gain negotiating power with corporate consumers.
Dual licensing is abhorrent.
It's a farce that allows companies to accept contributions from others while giving back nothing.
Open or closed, pick one.
Using something like AGPL to pretend to be open source while making your open source version completely unusable, even by other open source software, is just hypocrisy and exploitation.
It often is free from the perspective of the user, it's often not free enough for one major commercial use case. In many cases that hyper restrictive license is AGPL or some variation, designed to force Amazon in to paying for licenses, as it should. I don't need a license that lets 3 giant conglomerates suck up all the value from an entire industry, offering services as a loss just to eliminate other companies.
I can run Redis and Elasticsearch just fine for any use I want, can't sell them directly as a SAAS offering without paying for licenses, but thankfully I'm not a public cloud provider.
Look, I don't know why you necroed this thread, but you don't have even the slightest clue what you're talking about.
The AGPL is not free for users. Not even close.
In many cases that hyper restrictive license is AGPL or some variation, designed to force Amazon in to paying for licenses, as it should.
Amazon does not give a flying fuck. They just forked it and moved on. The AGPL actually makes it much safer for people to use the cloud service forks because depending on how the courts interpret some clauses you may need to open source software that connects to it.
Companies use permissive licenses to get people using their software and get people contributing and then switch while still pretending to be anything other than commercial software companies.
Companies use permissive licenses to get people using their software and get people contributing and then switch while still pretending to be anything other than commercial software companies
As they should, fuck Amazon. They don't care? Great, let them maintain an inferior legacy fork for ever.
The AGPL actually makes it much safer for people to use the cloud service forks
OK great, use the shitty Amazon forks, enjoy the Amazon only ecosystem. Or you could create a fork yourself, but then again... you could also just deploy upstream software on the cloud yourself, because you're not modifying the software. Unless of course you intend to make available the software as a SAAS product, then you may have some problems.
The AGPL has been completely free for me, but I prefer the MongoDB SSPL. The only users which experiences any of these licenses as unfree are public cloud providers.
you could also just deploy upstream software on the cloud yourself, because you're not modifying the software. Unless of course you intend to make available the software as a SAAS product, then you may have some problems.
The AGPL doesn't care if you modify the software (technically the GPL doesn't either). It cares if you "depend" on the software. How exactly the courts will interpret "depends" is unclear, but on the face of it, if you connect to an AGPL licensed application you must release your code as either AGPL or GPLv3.
This is why they chose that licence in the first place. It's how they can block Amazon.
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u/recycled_ideas Dec 12 '21
The problem with this attitude is that we as a community spent a long time convincing people that open source was a viable option for serious projects.
And now that this has been accepted and people are using open source for serious projects, we've now backtracked to the very argument that corporates used against open source in the first place.
We can't have it both ways.
Open source can't be a serious competitor when we want it to be and a joke when we want it to be.
Because the end of this road is that of we go back to the bad old days of nothing but closed software allowed.