3 ms·

Plenty of companies would also use the non-AGPL software without any strings attached, and not contribute patches anyway. You may be lucky enough to get bug rep

by aseipp 10y ago

Plenty of companies would also use the non-AGPL software without any strings attached, and not contribute patches anyway. You may be lucky enough to get bug reports, though (and, in effect, become a free labor source for a corporation). So what's the point? Most of the time, this kind of position just comes across as a vague, empty posturing, to be quite honest. "I could definitely be a good friend to you, you see... if you cooperate and help out your new friend". It sounds like a very obvious choice when you phrase it as "we wouldn't contribute patches to you", but that's just a way of holding out a carrot and hoping for people to bite, phrasing it as a "your loss" scenario. At least it is, to me. What am I losing, exactly? My code is right there. I haven't lost anything at all, except maybe some vague, hypothetical possibility of a little extra help -- which, in general, seems to rarely materialize in the way people imagine anyway, for a host of reasons (companies are slow, they're lazy, their hacks are incomplete and unsuitable for an upstream, they're anti-OSS contribution in general and only disallow using the GPL, but disallow contributing to anything, etc). There is plenty of software that, very arguably IMO, should be available under non-GPL terms for a host of reasons, it's true (even the FSF agrees with this, to help support and promote e.g. interoperable, royalty-free codecs, algorithms, which benefit from public domain availability). And licensing is also a complicated legal, political and, at some level, personal topic as we pick licenses that we believe represent our goals and values. We should treat it that way. But phrasing the scenario in such a manner, where there's a narrative that "The only thing the AGPL will do is ensure I write 0 patches (even though I would have likely written 0 patches in any case), so uhhh, think about that", feels like an attempt to poison the well, even if you didn't intend it to be. We could just as easily turn it around: if you literally aren't going to contribute patches, to return some of the benefit bequeathed to you by the virtue of using my code -- why should I even care a tiny bit about you or your company, or whether you "need" to use my software to achieve your own goals? Clearly, you don't need it so badly that you're willing to agree to the rules. Why bother? So you can just freeload on the people who do agree to the rules? If this isn't your intent or I'm being overly presumptuous, I apologize. But even then, I still dislike the narrative that pops up around these arguments, even if I may be reading too much into your particular comment.

abraae 10y ago
I believe, respectfully, that you're reading posturing into my position where none exists. In a typical scenario for us, we use some open source software for our SaaS platform. We need to extend it in ways that weren't envisaged, so we (a) add some hooks to allow extensions and (b) add the extensions themselves. Our preference is to contribute both (a) and usually (b) back to the project. But sometimes for business reasons we can't contribute (b), or at least not until more people internally have their heads around it. AGPL stops us from contributing (a) and not (b). So we just don't use AGPL software. I wasn't trying to poison the well, I was just indicating what our decision making process is. Some people, like us, have valid business reasons for not using AGPL software, even though we love OSS. I find it weird that this narrative thing pops up here. There's no narrative. If I was the owner of said AGPL software, I probably wouldn't give a rat's arse if anyone said they weren't going to use my software. But my original post was a specific response to someone who said "Not sure what the downsides are." [of using AGPL]. So let me try again. Here's one possible downside - *you may miss out on some patches that you would have otherwise got, since your license is incompatible with some people's business needs".

by aseipp 10y ago

abraae 10y ago

I believe, respectfully, that you're reading posturing into my position where none exists. In a typical scenario for us, we use some open source software for our SaaS platform. We need to extend it in ways that weren't envisaged, so we (a) add some hooks to allow extensions and (b) add the extensions themselves. Our preference is to contribute both (a) and usually (b) back to the project. But sometimes for business reasons we can't contribute (b), or at least not until more people internally have their heads around it. AGPL stops us from contributing (a) and not (b). So we just don't use AGPL software. I wasn't trying to poison the well, I was just indicating what our decision making process is. Some people, like us, have valid business reasons for not using AGPL software, even though we love OSS. I find it weird that this narrative thing pops up here. There's no narrative. If I was the owner of said AGPL software, I probably wouldn't give a rat's arse if anyone said they weren't going to use my software. But my original post was a specific response to someone who said "Not sure what the downsides are." [of using AGPL]. So let me try again. Here's one possible downside - *you may miss out on some patches that you would have otherwise got, since your license is incompatible with some people's business needs".