4 ms·

It's using a license that ensures that it'll probably stay dead; this is a reasonable criticism. Anyone using the code is forced to "pass on the same freedom"

It's using a license that ensures that it'll probably stay dead; this is a reasonable criticism. Anyone using the code is forced to "pass on the same freedom" to original code that's infected by the AGPL license. Talk about entitlement.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Works for Neo4j, MongoDB, ownCloud and some others. Freedom ain't free. There is a price you have to pay. That price is to pass on the same freedoms to others, the freedoms which you explicitly benefited from in your use of the software. To me that sounds like an exceptionally reasonable requirement, but evidently the one not being a grubby freeloader is somehow entitled in your worldview. Interesting how that works. This reflects the fundamental schism between free software and open source, at least philosophically rather than in terms of what licenses fall under their definitions. Free software implies an ethical responsibility to give back to the community, open source is a way to conveniently reappropriate other people's labor with no obligation to contribute, while hiding behind the cloak of "technical superiority" and "code quality" (which is bullshit).
- pquerna 11y ago
  > Works for Neo4j, MongoDB, ownCloud and some others. None of these are abandonware. All three are VC-backed companies. An AGPLv3 license is extremely restrictive for what amounts to a code dump.
  - leni536 11y ago
    Maybe they borrowed code from other AGPLv3 projects?
- teacup50 11y ago
  Well, we agree that there's a philosophical difference. In my world view, there's nothing ethical about laying claim to all future work output of my own in exchange for incorporating any amount of copyleft code. This situation favors the original author in the extreme, which is why it's not surprising to see that this works for maintained projects owned by a single author/organization, such as Neo4j, MongoDB, ownCloud, "and some others". However, the answer for people other than the original author is, unsurprisingly, to generally avoid copyleft code. The proof is in the pudding; the majority of usable successful projects are licensed in a way that grant the author(s) the ability to benefit from their work outside the straightjacket confines of copyleft.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Well, no, that's a mischaracterization. The provisions are only triggered when redistributing it, and further many GPL projects have linking exceptions, assuming the LGPL isn't used outright. AGPL is stricter because the semantics of networked services are different from local software. It actually doesn't favor the original author that much. Permissive licensing is more adapt at massive propagation, hence why it's preferred for some low-level or utility libraries like zlib where you would rather not have those be poorly reinvented. The proof is in the pudding; the majority of usable successful projects are licensed in a way that grant the author(s) the ability to benefit from their work outside the straightjacket confines of copyleft. Ignoring the stupidity of defining copyleft as a "straitjacket" when it's clearly beneficial for continuing free terms, most of the popular free software is in fact copyleft, be it GPL, LGPL or MPL. FileZilla, GIMP, Notepad++, Blender, VLC, Wordpress, etc. Then for development, the GNU system is all copyleft and ubiquitous, just to list the most obvious example.
    - teacup50 11y ago
      The "you have to distribute it" argument doesn't matter. When your company IP is subject to onerous restrictions as soon as you have to "distribute it", you've greatly reduced the value of that work, now and into the future. It's notable that your popular examples had to be qualified to be limited to "free" (as in open-source) software. The majority of popular software isn't open source at all. Your examples also include software that is 1) maintained by copyright-holding commercial organizations who 2) rely on the asymmetric relationship created by copyleft to build a sustainable business in which they can actually sell IP rights beyond copyleft for profit. The copyleft ideal of "user freedom" is founded on the premise of a software industry barter economy in which the only tradable resource is not even software, since that's freely copied by anyone, but rather, actual time spent writing software. This is insane, not least of all because the vast majority of humanity can not and does not want to write software, and even if that wasn't the case, time spent writing software is literally worthless outside of social standing. You can't use bartered time to pay rent or buy food, which means you cannot actually build a sustainable economy around purely copyleft software ideals in which anyone is able to recoup the real-world costs of spending time writing software in the first place.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Works for Neo4j, MongoDB, ownCloud and some others. Freedom ain't free. There is a price you have to pay. That price is to pass on the same freedoms to others, the freedoms which you explicitly benefited from in your use of the software. To me that sounds like an exceptionally reasonable requirement, but evidently the one not being a grubby freeloader is somehow entitled in your worldview. Interesting how that works. This reflects the fundamental schism between free software and open source, at least philosophically rather than in terms of what licenses fall under their definitions. Free software implies an ethical responsibility to give back to the community, open source is a way to conveniently reappropriate other people's labor with no obligation to contribute, while hiding behind the cloak of "technical superiority" and "code quality" (which is bullshit).

pquerna 11y ago
> Works for Neo4j, MongoDB, ownCloud and some others. None of these are abandonware. All three are VC-backed companies. An AGPLv3 license is extremely restrictive for what amounts to a code dump.
- leni536 11y ago
  Maybe they borrowed code from other AGPLv3 projects?
teacup50 11y ago
Well, we agree that there's a philosophical difference. In my world view, there's nothing ethical about laying claim to all future work output of my own in exchange for incorporating any amount of copyleft code. This situation favors the original author in the extreme, which is why it's not surprising to see that this works for maintained projects owned by a single author/organization, such as Neo4j, MongoDB, ownCloud, "and some others". However, the answer for people other than the original author is, unsurprisingly, to generally avoid copyleft code. The proof is in the pudding; the majority of usable successful projects are licensed in a way that grant the author(s) the ability to benefit from their work outside the straightjacket confines of copyleft.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Well, no, that's a mischaracterization. The provisions are only triggered when redistributing it, and further many GPL projects have linking exceptions, assuming the LGPL isn't used outright. AGPL is stricter because the semantics of networked services are different from local software. It actually doesn't favor the original author that much. Permissive licensing is more adapt at massive propagation, hence why it's preferred for some low-level or utility libraries like zlib where you would rather not have those be poorly reinvented. The proof is in the pudding; the majority of usable successful projects are licensed in a way that grant the author(s) the ability to benefit from their work outside the straightjacket confines of copyleft. Ignoring the stupidity of defining copyleft as a "straitjacket" when it's clearly beneficial for continuing free terms, most of the popular free software is in fact copyleft, be it GPL, LGPL or MPL. FileZilla, GIMP, Notepad++, Blender, VLC, Wordpress, etc. Then for development, the GNU system is all copyleft and ubiquitous, just to list the most obvious example.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    The "you have to distribute it" argument doesn't matter. When your company IP is subject to onerous restrictions as soon as you have to "distribute it", you've greatly reduced the value of that work, now and into the future. It's notable that your popular examples had to be qualified to be limited to "free" (as in open-source) software. The majority of popular software isn't open source at all. Your examples also include software that is 1) maintained by copyright-holding commercial organizations who 2) rely on the asymmetric relationship created by copyleft to build a sustainable business in which they can actually sell IP rights beyond copyleft for profit. The copyleft ideal of "user freedom" is founded on the premise of a software industry barter economy in which the only tradable resource is not even software, since that's freely copied by anyone, but rather, actual time spent writing software. This is insane, not least of all because the vast majority of humanity can not and does not want to write software, and even if that wasn't the case, time spent writing software is literally worthless outside of social standing. You can't use bartered time to pay rent or buy food, which means you cannot actually build a sustainable economy around purely copyleft software ideals in which anyone is able to recoup the real-world costs of spending time writing software in the first place.