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This really bugs me. Copyleft has always been feared by lawyers and corporate people alike. Let's not forget how Ballmer called the GPL a cancer that infects ev

by jordigh 10y ago

This really bugs me. Copyleft has always been feared by lawyers and corporate people alike. Let's not forget how Ballmer called the GPL a cancer that infects everything it touches. Yet, copyleft is our only defense against abusive proprietary software and without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git, or OpenWrt. The AGPL is just an updated GPL. Back when software mostly came in boxes, the GPL was as feared as the AGPL is now. Now that software mostly comes from the internet, the AGPL is there to address this new distribution method. Now the AGPL is the new cancer. Overzealous lawyers trying to "protect" copyrights have indoctrinated an entire generation of hackers that sharing code is a danger and the AGPL is the prime threat. I have spoken to too many Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google employees that are convinced that sharing their source code would be tantamount to death. The result is a world where their secret software controls the news we read, the ads we see, the people we talk to, and even the emotions we feel. "Open source, but licensed under the AGPL.", says the article. There is no "but" here. The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. If you have nothing to fear from open source, you have nothing to fear from the AGPL.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
I'm very outspoken against the GPL so take this comment with a grain of salt. > The AGPL is just an updated GPL. The AGPL is significantly more than an updated GPL and there are loads of companies which have a blanket policy in place to not even get anywhere close to AGPL code because of the uncertainties about how it actually works. > The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. Maybe it's the definition of free software but it's definitely not the definition of open source. Many of us in the open source community see our work as something that should be open for everybody to use.
- Flimm 10y ago
  If we're going to sink our time into the old copyleft vs permissive licenses debate, I wish we would be more precise with our words. AGPL is an open source license, according to OSI, the only authority on what constitutes open source. https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 You say "open for everybody to use". Both open source licenses and free/libre licences guarantee that the software is open for use. You're actually talking about freedom to combine with closed source/proprietary software, not about end-users freedom to use the software.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    If nobody uses a piece of software, its freedom is debatable. I don't know of anyone using agpl'd code to build software people use.
    - SamReidHughes 10y ago
      You never heard of anybody using MongoDB?
      - dsp1234 10y ago
        Note that the official MongoDB C driver is Apache licensed, which is what most developers would make a derivative work from. https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-c-driver/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-c-driver/blob/master/COPYIN...
        SamReidHughes 10y ago
        RethinkDB's drivers are Apache licensed.
        the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        FWIW that was part of the problem since that's a walking license violation go the AGPL by many interpretations. It's just that Mingo/Rethink violate their own license there. However any other client? Unclear.
        manarth 10y ago
        [they] violate their own license Careful with the word "violate": as a copyright holder, you cannot violate your own license. The copyright holder has intrinsic rights; licenses are permission to extend a subset of rights to third parties.
      - darfs 10y ago
- niftich 10y ago
  There is little uncertainty -- the terms are in plain language. OP implied that the GNU Affero GPLv3 is an updated GPLv3 "in spirit" to reflect how today a lot of software is run on the backend, instead of distributed to clients directly. I believe this is an accurate characterization. Compare the GNU GPLv3 and the GNU Affero GPLv3 yourself [1]. [1] https://www.diffchecker.com/1J4xEohZ https://www.diffchecker.com/1J4xEohZ
  - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    > There is little uncertainty -- the terms are in plain language Just because a license says something does not mean that everybody interprets it the same way or that the clauses are valid in it. The "Remote Network Interaction" section has never made it to court and there are countless different interpretations one can draw from this.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - niftich 10y ago
      Deploy some game theory here. Regardless of what the drafters of GNU Affero GPLv3 intended, there are really four outcomes here (with wording since edited for clarity): Precondition: Take a GNU Affero GPv3 product, modify it, and expose it over a network, directly or by proxy, over a network, for users to use. Your four possibilities: (1) If you provide source, and the courts uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you're fine. (2) If you don't provide source, and the courts uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you're screwed. (3) If you provide source, and the courts don't uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you're fine, but you would've been fine not providing the code in retrospect. (4) If you don't provide source, and the courts don't uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you've defeated the GNU Affero GPLv3 in court. You can absolutely make the argument for or against the business risks of releasing source code, but you can't make the argument for 'uncertainty'.
  - geofft 10y ago
    What does "interacting with it remotely through a computer network" mean? If I take some caching algorithm from RethinkDB and put it in my fork of OpenSSL, do I have to make it possible for everyone who connects to my SSL server to download the source of my fork? Do I need to start stuffing the URL of corresponding source into my certificate? I'd hope the answer is no, but what in the license makes it clear that the answer is no?
- adekok 10y ago
  > I'm very outspoken against the GPL I'm curious as to why. The GPL has manifestly built the modern internet (cloud servers are mostly Linux, most IT startups use Linux, etc.) There are other open source licences which are also widely used (Apache, BSD, MIT). So I think the key thing to this wide-spread success is open source in general, and not the license in particular. Would you say that the GPL is negative? I.e. would we have been better off of Linux was BSD licenses? If so, why? If not, why be against the GPL?
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Personally, I find it hilarious that people will proclaim copyleft as the "most free", when it not only is more restrictive, but forces people who use it to open source their own contributions as well. I don't think any license should be able to tell people what to do with their own work, which yes, includes contributions to existing work. Even though I personally believe in open sourcing everything possible, when all else is equal, I would always choose something that isn't copyleft over something that is. Because I shouldn't really have to be bothered by copyright infringement concerns when using open source software.
    - swsieber 10y ago
      You have to open your contributions when you build upon GPL'd software, not when you use it. The GPL is very much centered around the end user, not programmers who build things. We often talk about the GPL as programmers and forget it was really built to protect the average joe from being locked out. It's most free for end users.
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        Sure, I get that. But that makes it a very opinionated form of free and open. While permissive licenses like Apache and MIT do have terms, they are much more akin to saying "here is a thing I made, and I'm sharing it with whoever wants to use it and whatever they want to do with it". Whereas copyleft licenses are more like "I'll share this with you, but you have to use it in accordance with my beliefs". While I accept that the OSI definition of "open source" is pretty much universally accepted and probably isn't going to change, I personally don't really feel like copyleft should qualify because of that level of control it exerts.
tyingq 10y ago
It's just a reality that for some companies, having to release their internal source code would represent a potential loss of revenue or other business risk, or break an existing agreement or contract with a 3rd party. So, a fair amount of the opposition to using AGPL software isn't based on some deep rooted belief that's it's somehow evil or a cancer. Just a reasonable belief that using APGL software internally might open up unreasonable risk. I would think that the FSF would be okay with that. Companies that are unwilling to comply with the AGPL avoiding it entirely, versus using APGL software and not abiding by the license. There are certainly companies that contribute back to open source, but only for a subset of the available open source licenses.
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  To add to this: not all companies have a stellar engineering team that is capable of dividing the code base in such a way that some could be open sourced while other remains private. The legal team for said companies know full well the technical debt and as a result everything remains private.
shadowmint 10y ago
I don't believe in copyleft anymore. People use it; but it seems the majority of people using it aren't actually contributing to the community; they're just also offering commercial licensing; that is to say, it's commercially recognized as so restrictive it is an effective tool to make people pay for your software. The FSF enforces the GPL to 'ensure that free software distributors respect their obligations to pass on the freedom to all users, to share, study and modify the code.' ...but when your tools are used to drive commercial decisions and people are paying you for compliance, you're not facilitating free software any more; you're just another pay-for-subscription vendor.
- adekok 10y ago
  > it's commercially recognized as so restrictive it is an effective tool to make people pay for your software. How does it do that? Speaking from personal experience, there are multiple companies making tens of millions a year from selling products based on my GPL'd software. In every case, they have additional proprietary work in addition to the GPLd software that makes a "product", and not just a "tar.gz" download. There are companies offering free downloads of GPLd versions of their software, and paid downloads of their proprietary software. And nothing forces a company to use GPL software. If they don't like the GPL license on my software, they're free to write their own, or find a BSD licensed replacement. A lot of the anti-GPL complaints I've seen amount to "I can see the software, but I can't use it under terms of my choosing, so I'm mad at the authors for choosing a 'bad' license." Which seems to be the case here.
  - shadowmint 10y ago
    Take a step back and ask yourself, what is the goal of the FSF? Free. Software. Not 'make life easier for some people who use GPL software'. Not 'enforce GPL license agreements'. Not 'prevent some people from using some software unless they agree to some license'. Free. Software. That is, software you are free to modify, change or use, without restriction and without having to pay for it. People who are 'pro-GPL' pull out all of these crazy business reasons about competitive advantages and changing the way people do things to encourage commercial entities to contribute to open source and be good community members; but I've come to the conclusion it's all a load of rubbish. I believe in free software, and I'm happy to make my software free. ...but the GPL isnt free and doesn't support the community. So... if you use it, and like it... go for it; but community is important, and I, for one, have gone from zero interest in rethinkDB to be interested in using it and being a contributor. So; take what I said worth a grain of salt; but the anti-GPL people out there aren't all business people angry they can't make their LOB apps with an AGPL dependency; there are also people, like me, who care about free software, and think that the GPL harms the community and actively discourages community contributions. THAT, is a failure for the FSF.
mnutt 10y ago
Not a lawyer, but the challenge I see with AGPL is that it leaves room for ambiguous interpretation. My reading of it says (paraphrasing) "if you combine AGPL software with your program and that program interacts with others over the network, you must provide the source". Web applications today are often composed of dozens of services and very few interact directly with the end user. Putting a reverse proxy in front of an AGPL app certainly violates the spirit of the license. When using an AGPL database, you might argue that the end-user is "interacting" with it, but I'm not sure. There are also plenty of other use cases where a network service could do something auxiliary to the user's requests. In the past MongoDB has argued that using their AGPL database without providing source code is fine, Neo4j has argued the opposite. As strictly interpreted it seems like as long as you don't expose the AGPL app to end users you're not in violation. Maybe the license authors intended this, maybe they intended "if you use an AGPL application that in any way affects an end user's interaction, you must provide the source to that end user."
- zerocrates 10y ago
  The action that subjects you to the remote network interaction restriction at the heart of the AGPL is "modifying" the covered work. Modification is defined exactly the same in the AGPL as in the GPL. I don't think putting a reverse proxy in front of an AGPL app means much of anything in terms of either the letter or the spirit of the license. Mongo's separation of Apache-licensed drivers from the server is about making it so that applications don't have to link to the AGPL'd server code, thereby avoiding "modifying" it. Without a modification, the network interaction section isn't triggered at all.
  - mnutt 10y ago
    The "work" in this case would be the modified AGPL service. Using a reverse proxy, the "end user" would be the person running the reverse proxy, so you would owe source modification code to yourself, but nobody else.
    - zerocrates 10y ago
      There's a possibility that courts would interpret the remote interaction clause very narrowly as you suggest, allowing people to sidestep the teeth of the license easily. I think that possibility is fairly small, but you never know for sure of course. Still, my main point was that the route taken by Mongo is intended to remove this kind of uncertainty: normal applications using it don't modify or include any AGPL code, so the question of just how far "remote interaction" goes never comes up.
geofft 10y ago
The fear of the GPL from uncertainty certainly sounded similar to some of the arguments 'bcantrill is making against the GPL: it hasn't been tested in court, big companies lawyers' won't use it, etc. But there are big differences between the arguments. The historical worry about the GPL not being tested in court was that the GPL wouldn't hold up, that it would lead to strange outcomes like the GPL being non-enforceable because it's illegal price-fixing (or whatever), and suddenly SCO can take all the code they've distributed under the GPL and start suing people to pay commercial licensing fees. That's not the worry about the AGPL. It's clearly a valid license; nobody is claiming otherwise. The worry is that it's too valid, and nobody has defined exactly what interacting with it over the network means. If I run a public-facing, auth-requiring RethinkDB server, am I obligated to make source available to anyone who connects to it? If my build system sucks (and most build systems do suck), am I legally liable for not providing a working build script that a third party can use, even if every patch I have is in a public bugtracker? The lawyers who worry about the AGPL aren't lawyers who worry about FOSS in general, as was the case with the GPL. These are lawyers who encourage use of GPL software, who usually oversee release of code under the GPL, etc. The AGPL is different, or at least is seen differently by lawyers who accept every other OSI-approved license. Calling it "just an updated GPL" may well be ideologically true, but it makes it difficult to address the actual objection to the AGPL that's not an objection to the GPL. We know, now, that we have "nothing to fear" from open source, but also that commercial software companies should care about the difference between e.g. simple permissive licenses and the GPL. The entire iOS app ecosystem, for instance, runs on a rich community of MIT/BSD-licensed libraries. Nobody "fears" the GPL, but everyone knows not to use it. In the same way, it's entirely reasonable for organizations to determine that for a specific use case, both simple permissive licenses and GPL-style licenses are fine, but AGPL-style ones aren't.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > If I run a public-facing, auth-requiring RethinkDB server, am I obligated to make source available to anyone who connects to it? Yes, that is precisely what the AGPL means. If you have some proprietary web application that is the user of RethinkDB that your users connect to instead, then no, since the modifications are only used internally by you. The goal here is to prevent SaaS-ification of AGPL'ed applications, if you host an application under the license and make it available to others you can't hide your changes just because the users aren't directly installing the binaries. > If my build system sucks (and most build systems do suck), am I legally liable for not providing a working build script that a third party can use, even if every patch I have is in a public bugtracker? The A/GPL does require you provide the neccesary tooling or instructions to build the source, so, yes. > In the same way, it's entirely reasonable for organizations to determine that for a specific use case, both simple permissive licenses and GPL-style licenses are fine, but AGPL-style ones aren't. If you're trying to make money off the backs of GPL'ed software by making modifications to it and then throwing it behind a service so you don't technically have to redistribute your changes then, yes, you should be wary of the AGPL. You should also feel ashamed of yourself. That being said, there's some projects licensed under the AGPL that have given me pause, like GhostScript. I've had to yank that out of projects, because even though they are used internally-only, we are linking to the code which means the project as a whole becomes AGPL licensed. Things like MongoDB/RethinkDB are non-issues since they are only being accessed over the network, the client can be licensed under whatever they damn well want.
justin66 10y ago
> Copyleft has always been feared by lawyers and corporate people alike. ...and open source developers using every other license there is.
EGreg 10y ago
This is good for us. When I built the Qbix Platform[1] my vision was to re-decentralize the social web. Like Wordpress but to disrupt walled gardens of Facebook, Google+, etc. I envisioned a community of developers freely building apps on this platform and organizations installing them like Wordpress. Thus I wanted to open source it. But our company was funded by investors and we had big dreams of being the main supplier of our software. We didn't want to put it out there and have it be immediately forked and taken away from us by Facebook or Google, who would then roll it out to all their users. I wanted a way to all indie developers be free to develop and contribute to the long tail of apps on this platform. While at the same time not giving a free gift to the giant corporations who I felt could abuse it and take it over, like they have done with so many other things. I met with Eben Moglen, lawyer for the FSF. The meeting was quite strange. But in the end he answered my main question: "Use the AGPL. The corporate giants have policies not to touch it with a thirty foot pole." So that's what the default license is for our platform today. When our ecosystem is large enough, we may change it. But for now, free software is good. It is why linux runs on toasters. It is why wikipedia has more articles than any private encylopedia. If only medical breakthroughs were developed this way. 1. https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  And when that's the goal, a more controlling license like copyleft makes a lot of sense. Especially in the case of a codebase from a failed startup that is no longer building a business around it though, a permissive license makes more sense.
jephir 10y ago
> without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git Why would this be the case? FreeBSD and SVN were developed without copyleft. GPL is not necessary to get people to contribute to open source.
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  Apple seems like a good example of where someone made a proprietary fork of a non-left license, and made only trivial contributions back.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    NeXT's usage of BSD predates BSD being available under any open source license, and as such macOS/iOS's use of it seems like a direct consequence of that rather than it being under a non-left license.
    - appleflaxen 10y ago
      I don't understand why the license at the time is relevant. The point is that if it had been copyleft, they would be required to contribute back. It wasn't, so they weren't and didn't.
- greyman 10y ago
  This wasn't a particularly good counterexample, since Linux is more advanced and successful than FreeBSD, and same can by said about git.
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    By which metric is Linux more advanced than FreeBSD? Companies like Netflix use FreeBSD because its networking stack blows Linux out of the water. Further, how about Xorg, Apache, BIND, Nginx, etc? Significant amounts of userland tools and applications are written under more liberal licenses.
  - 10y ago
gregmac 10y ago
> I have spoken to too many Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google employees that are convinced that sharing their source code would be tantamount to death. The result is a world where their secret software controls the news we read, the ads we see, the people we talk to, and even the emotions we feel. Can you make a counter-argument to this? Let's even just focus on Facebook and Google core's core offerings: What benefit would Google get from open sourcing their indexer, ranking algorithms, and core search software? What benefit would Facebook get from doing the same with their ad-matching and timeline/recommendation software?
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  S/he is NOT claiming that "open source is always good", which is the straw man you are trying to knock down. claim: "source code is [not necessarily] tantamount to death" you provide several counterexamples where (it seems) you think it would be tantamount to death. But regardless of your number of examples, there only needs to be one case where it's not tantamount to death for the author's point to be valid.
hedora 10y ago
Agreed, though the FSF explicitly chose gplv3 over an agpl style license. My two cents: The irony is that the GPL was meant to protect users' freedom, and cloud services are a giant unforeseen loophole in the GPL that is even more abusive of user freedoms than old school proprietary software (NSA, ad trackers, forced upgrades, censorship, mass deletions, etc). There is more money in closed source centralized services, and the FSF was afraid to stand up for the principles it was founded on. I hope the industry eventually rebuilds itself on the AGPL (and BSL + AGPL for active, commercially developed stuff), but the fight will be at least as hard as mainstreaming the gpl was.
meanduck 10y ago
> "Open source, but licensed under the AGPL.", says the article. There is no "but" here. The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. If you have nothing to fear from open source, you have nothing to fear from the AGPL. If you want the project to be openly collabrative but quasi-free, calling it Open Source would be hijacking the term. Call it Social Justice Licence or something.

by jordigh 10y ago

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago

I'm very outspoken against the GPL so take this comment with a grain of salt. > The AGPL is just an updated GPL. The AGPL is significantly more than an updated GPL and there are loads of companies which have a blanket policy in place to not even get anywhere close to AGPL code because of the uncertainties about how it actually works. > The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. Maybe it's the definition of free software but it's definitely not the definition of open source. Many of us in the open source community see our work as something that should be open for everybody to use.

Flimm 10y ago
If we're going to sink our time into the old copyleft vs permissive licenses debate, I wish we would be more precise with our words. AGPL is an open source license, according to OSI, the only authority on what constitutes open source. https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 You say "open for everybody to use". Both open source licenses and free/libre licences guarantee that the software is open for use. You're actually talking about freedom to combine with closed source/proprietary software, not about end-users freedom to use the software.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  If nobody uses a piece of software, its freedom is debatable. I don't know of anyone using agpl'd code to build software people use.
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    You never heard of anybody using MongoDB?
    - dsp1234 10y ago
      Note that the official MongoDB C driver is Apache licensed, which is what most developers would make a derivative work from. https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-c-driver/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-c-driver/blob/master/COPYIN...
      - SamReidHughes 10y ago
        RethinkDB's drivers are Apache licensed.
        the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        FWIW that was part of the problem since that's a walking license violation go the AGPL by many interpretations. It's just that Mingo/Rethink violate their own license there. However any other client? Unclear.
        manarth 10y ago
        [they] violate their own license Careful with the word "violate": as a copyright holder, you cannot violate your own license. The copyright holder has intrinsic rights; licenses are permission to extend a subset of rights to third parties.
    - darfs 10y ago
niftich 10y ago
There is little uncertainty -- the terms are in plain language. OP implied that the GNU Affero GPLv3 is an updated GPLv3 "in spirit" to reflect how today a lot of software is run on the backend, instead of distributed to clients directly. I believe this is an accurate characterization. Compare the GNU GPLv3 and the GNU Affero GPLv3 yourself [1]. [1] https://www.diffchecker.com/1J4xEohZ https://www.diffchecker.com/1J4xEohZ
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  > There is little uncertainty -- the terms are in plain language Just because a license says something does not mean that everybody interprets it the same way or that the clauses are valid in it. The "Remote Network Interaction" section has never made it to court and there are countless different interpretations one can draw from this.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - niftich 10y ago
    Deploy some game theory here. Regardless of what the drafters of GNU Affero GPLv3 intended, there are really four outcomes here (with wording since edited for clarity): Precondition: Take a GNU Affero GPv3 product, modify it, and expose it over a network, directly or by proxy, over a network, for users to use. Your four possibilities: (1) If you provide source, and the courts uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you're fine. (2) If you don't provide source, and the courts uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you're screwed. (3) If you provide source, and the courts don't uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you're fine, but you would've been fine not providing the code in retrospect. (4) If you don't provide source, and the courts don't uphold the 'Remote Network Interaction' clause: you've defeated the GNU Affero GPLv3 in court. You can absolutely make the argument for or against the business risks of releasing source code, but you can't make the argument for 'uncertainty'.
- geofft 10y ago
  What does "interacting with it remotely through a computer network" mean? If I take some caching algorithm from RethinkDB and put it in my fork of OpenSSL, do I have to make it possible for everyone who connects to my SSL server to download the source of my fork? Do I need to start stuffing the URL of corresponding source into my certificate? I'd hope the answer is no, but what in the license makes it clear that the answer is no?
adekok 10y ago
> I'm very outspoken against the GPL I'm curious as to why. The GPL has manifestly built the modern internet (cloud servers are mostly Linux, most IT startups use Linux, etc.) There are other open source licences which are also widely used (Apache, BSD, MIT). So I think the key thing to this wide-spread success is open source in general, and not the license in particular. Would you say that the GPL is negative? I.e. would we have been better off of Linux was BSD licenses? If so, why? If not, why be against the GPL?
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Personally, I find it hilarious that people will proclaim copyleft as the "most free", when it not only is more restrictive, but forces people who use it to open source their own contributions as well. I don't think any license should be able to tell people what to do with their own work, which yes, includes contributions to existing work. Even though I personally believe in open sourcing everything possible, when all else is equal, I would always choose something that isn't copyleft over something that is. Because I shouldn't really have to be bothered by copyright infringement concerns when using open source software.
  - swsieber 10y ago
    You have to open your contributions when you build upon GPL'd software, not when you use it. The GPL is very much centered around the end user, not programmers who build things. We often talk about the GPL as programmers and forget it was really built to protect the average joe from being locked out. It's most free for end users.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Sure, I get that. But that makes it a very opinionated form of free and open. While permissive licenses like Apache and MIT do have terms, they are much more akin to saying "here is a thing I made, and I'm sharing it with whoever wants to use it and whatever they want to do with it". Whereas copyleft licenses are more like "I'll share this with you, but you have to use it in accordance with my beliefs". While I accept that the OSI definition of "open source" is pretty much universally accepted and probably isn't going to change, I personally don't really feel like copyleft should qualify because of that level of control it exerts.

tyingq 10y ago

It's just a reality that for some companies, having to release their internal source code would represent a potential loss of revenue or other business risk, or break an existing agreement or contract with a 3rd party. So, a fair amount of the opposition to using AGPL software isn't based on some deep rooted belief that's it's somehow evil or a cancer. Just a reasonable belief that using APGL software internally might open up unreasonable risk. I would think that the FSF would be okay with that. Companies that are unwilling to comply with the AGPL avoiding it entirely, versus using APGL software and not abiding by the license. There are certainly companies that contribute back to open source, but only for a subset of the available open source licenses.

chrisabrams 10y ago
To add to this: not all companies have a stellar engineering team that is capable of dividing the code base in such a way that some could be open sourced while other remains private. The legal team for said companies know full well the technical debt and as a result everything remains private.

shadowmint 10y ago

I don't believe in copyleft anymore. People use it; but it seems the majority of people using it aren't actually contributing to the community; they're just also offering commercial licensing; that is to say, it's commercially recognized as so restrictive it is an effective tool to make people pay for your software. The FSF enforces the GPL to 'ensure that free software distributors respect their obligations to pass on the freedom to all users, to share, study and modify the code.' ...but when your tools are used to drive commercial decisions and people are paying you for compliance, you're not facilitating free software any more; you're just another pay-for-subscription vendor.

adekok 10y ago
> it's commercially recognized as so restrictive it is an effective tool to make people pay for your software. How does it do that? Speaking from personal experience, there are multiple companies making tens of millions a year from selling products based on my GPL'd software. In every case, they have additional proprietary work in addition to the GPLd software that makes a "product", and not just a "tar.gz" download. There are companies offering free downloads of GPLd versions of their software, and paid downloads of their proprietary software. And nothing forces a company to use GPL software. If they don't like the GPL license on my software, they're free to write their own, or find a BSD licensed replacement. A lot of the anti-GPL complaints I've seen amount to "I can see the software, but I can't use it under terms of my choosing, so I'm mad at the authors for choosing a 'bad' license." Which seems to be the case here.
- shadowmint 10y ago
  Take a step back and ask yourself, what is the goal of the FSF? Free. Software. Not 'make life easier for some people who use GPL software'. Not 'enforce GPL license agreements'. Not 'prevent some people from using some software unless they agree to some license'. Free. Software. That is, software you are free to modify, change or use, without restriction and without having to pay for it. People who are 'pro-GPL' pull out all of these crazy business reasons about competitive advantages and changing the way people do things to encourage commercial entities to contribute to open source and be good community members; but I've come to the conclusion it's all a load of rubbish. I believe in free software, and I'm happy to make my software free. ...but the GPL isnt free and doesn't support the community. So... if you use it, and like it... go for it; but community is important, and I, for one, have gone from zero interest in rethinkDB to be interested in using it and being a contributor. So; take what I said worth a grain of salt; but the anti-GPL people out there aren't all business people angry they can't make their LOB apps with an AGPL dependency; there are also people, like me, who care about free software, and think that the GPL harms the community and actively discourages community contributions. THAT, is a failure for the FSF.

mnutt 10y ago

Not a lawyer, but the challenge I see with AGPL is that it leaves room for ambiguous interpretation. My reading of it says (paraphrasing) "if you combine AGPL software with your program and that program interacts with others over the network, you must provide the source". Web applications today are often composed of dozens of services and very few interact directly with the end user. Putting a reverse proxy in front of an AGPL app certainly violates the spirit of the license. When using an AGPL database, you might argue that the end-user is "interacting" with it, but I'm not sure. There are also plenty of other use cases where a network service could do something auxiliary to the user's requests. In the past MongoDB has argued that using their AGPL database without providing source code is fine, Neo4j has argued the opposite. As strictly interpreted it seems like as long as you don't expose the AGPL app to end users you're not in violation. Maybe the license authors intended this, maybe they intended "if you use an AGPL application that in any way affects an end user's interaction, you must provide the source to that end user."

zerocrates 10y ago
The action that subjects you to the remote network interaction restriction at the heart of the AGPL is "modifying" the covered work. Modification is defined exactly the same in the AGPL as in the GPL. I don't think putting a reverse proxy in front of an AGPL app means much of anything in terms of either the letter or the spirit of the license. Mongo's separation of Apache-licensed drivers from the server is about making it so that applications don't have to link to the AGPL'd server code, thereby avoiding "modifying" it. Without a modification, the network interaction section isn't triggered at all.
- mnutt 10y ago
  The "work" in this case would be the modified AGPL service. Using a reverse proxy, the "end user" would be the person running the reverse proxy, so you would owe source modification code to yourself, but nobody else.
  - zerocrates 10y ago
    There's a possibility that courts would interpret the remote interaction clause very narrowly as you suggest, allowing people to sidestep the teeth of the license easily. I think that possibility is fairly small, but you never know for sure of course. Still, my main point was that the route taken by Mongo is intended to remove this kind of uncertainty: normal applications using it don't modify or include any AGPL code, so the question of just how far "remote interaction" goes never comes up.

geofft 10y ago

The fear of the GPL from uncertainty certainly sounded similar to some of the arguments 'bcantrill is making against the GPL: it hasn't been tested in court, big companies lawyers' won't use it, etc. But there are big differences between the arguments. The historical worry about the GPL not being tested in court was that the GPL wouldn't hold up, that it would lead to strange outcomes like the GPL being non-enforceable because it's illegal price-fixing (or whatever), and suddenly SCO can take all the code they've distributed under the GPL and start suing people to pay commercial licensing fees. That's not the worry about the AGPL. It's clearly a valid license; nobody is claiming otherwise. The worry is that it's too valid, and nobody has defined exactly what interacting with it over the network means. If I run a public-facing, auth-requiring RethinkDB server, am I obligated to make source available to anyone who connects to it? If my build system sucks (and most build systems do suck), am I legally liable for not providing a working build script that a third party can use, even if every patch I have is in a public bugtracker? The lawyers who worry about the AGPL aren't lawyers who worry about FOSS in general, as was the case with the GPL. These are lawyers who encourage use of GPL software, who usually oversee release of code under the GPL, etc. The AGPL is different, or at least is seen differently by lawyers who accept every other OSI-approved license. Calling it "just an updated GPL" may well be ideologically true, but it makes it difficult to address the actual objection to the AGPL that's not an objection to the GPL. We know, now, that we have "nothing to fear" from open source, but also that commercial software companies should care about the difference between e.g. simple permissive licenses and the GPL. The entire iOS app ecosystem, for instance, runs on a rich community of MIT/BSD-licensed libraries. Nobody "fears" the GPL, but everyone knows not to use it. In the same way, it's entirely reasonable for organizations to determine that for a specific use case, both simple permissive licenses and GPL-style licenses are fine, but AGPL-style ones aren't.

snuxoll 10y ago
> If I run a public-facing, auth-requiring RethinkDB server, am I obligated to make source available to anyone who connects to it? Yes, that is precisely what the AGPL means. If you have some proprietary web application that is the user of RethinkDB that your users connect to instead, then no, since the modifications are only used internally by you. The goal here is to prevent SaaS-ification of AGPL'ed applications, if you host an application under the license and make it available to others you can't hide your changes just because the users aren't directly installing the binaries. > If my build system sucks (and most build systems do suck), am I legally liable for not providing a working build script that a third party can use, even if every patch I have is in a public bugtracker? The A/GPL does require you provide the neccesary tooling or instructions to build the source, so, yes. > In the same way, it's entirely reasonable for organizations to determine that for a specific use case, both simple permissive licenses and GPL-style licenses are fine, but AGPL-style ones aren't. If you're trying to make money off the backs of GPL'ed software by making modifications to it and then throwing it behind a service so you don't technically have to redistribute your changes then, yes, you should be wary of the AGPL. You should also feel ashamed of yourself. That being said, there's some projects licensed under the AGPL that have given me pause, like GhostScript. I've had to yank that out of projects, because even though they are used internally-only, we are linking to the code which means the project as a whole becomes AGPL licensed. Things like MongoDB/RethinkDB are non-issues since they are only being accessed over the network, the client can be licensed under whatever they damn well want.

justin66 10y ago

> Copyleft has always been feared by lawyers and corporate people alike. ...and open source developers using every other license there is.

EGreg 10y ago

This is good for us. When I built the Qbix Platform[1] my vision was to re-decentralize the social web. Like Wordpress but to disrupt walled gardens of Facebook, Google+, etc. I envisioned a community of developers freely building apps on this platform and organizations installing them like Wordpress. Thus I wanted to open source it. But our company was funded by investors and we had big dreams of being the main supplier of our software. We didn't want to put it out there and have it be immediately forked and taken away from us by Facebook or Google, who would then roll it out to all their users. I wanted a way to all indie developers be free to develop and contribute to the long tail of apps on this platform. While at the same time not giving a free gift to the giant corporations who I felt could abuse it and take it over, like they have done with so many other things. I met with Eben Moglen, lawyer for the FSF. The meeting was quite strange. But in the end he answered my main question: "Use the AGPL. The corporate giants have policies not to touch it with a thirty foot pole." So that's what the default license is for our platform today. When our ecosystem is large enough, we may change it. But for now, free software is good. It is why linux runs on toasters. It is why wikipedia has more articles than any private encylopedia. If only medical breakthroughs were developed this way. 1. https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
And when that's the goal, a more controlling license like copyleft makes a lot of sense. Especially in the case of a codebase from a failed startup that is no longer building a business around it though, a permissive license makes more sense.

jephir 10y ago

> without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git Why would this be the case? FreeBSD and SVN were developed without copyleft. GPL is not necessary to get people to contribute to open source.

appleflaxen 10y ago
Apple seems like a good example of where someone made a proprietary fork of a non-left license, and made only trivial contributions back.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  NeXT's usage of BSD predates BSD being available under any open source license, and as such macOS/iOS's use of it seems like a direct consequence of that rather than it being under a non-left license.
  - appleflaxen 10y ago
    I don't understand why the license at the time is relevant. The point is that if it had been copyleft, they would be required to contribute back. It wasn't, so they weren't and didn't.
greyman 10y ago
This wasn't a particularly good counterexample, since Linux is more advanced and successful than FreeBSD, and same can by said about git.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  By which metric is Linux more advanced than FreeBSD? Companies like Netflix use FreeBSD because its networking stack blows Linux out of the water. Further, how about Xorg, Apache, BIND, Nginx, etc? Significant amounts of userland tools and applications are written under more liberal licenses.
- 10y ago

gregmac 10y ago

> I have spoken to too many Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google employees that are convinced that sharing their source code would be tantamount to death. The result is a world where their secret software controls the news we read, the ads we see, the people we talk to, and even the emotions we feel. Can you make a counter-argument to this? Let's even just focus on Facebook and Google core's core offerings: What benefit would Google get from open sourcing their indexer, ranking algorithms, and core search software? What benefit would Facebook get from doing the same with their ad-matching and timeline/recommendation software?

appleflaxen 10y ago
S/he is NOT claiming that "open source is always good", which is the straw man you are trying to knock down. claim: "source code is [not necessarily] tantamount to death" you provide several counterexamples where (it seems) you think it would be tantamount to death. But regardless of your number of examples, there only needs to be one case where it's not tantamount to death for the author's point to be valid.

hedora 10y ago

Agreed, though the FSF explicitly chose gplv3 over an agpl style license. My two cents: The irony is that the GPL was meant to protect users' freedom, and cloud services are a giant unforeseen loophole in the GPL that is even more abusive of user freedoms than old school proprietary software (NSA, ad trackers, forced upgrades, censorship, mass deletions, etc). There is more money in closed source centralized services, and the FSF was afraid to stand up for the principles it was founded on. I hope the industry eventually rebuilds itself on the AGPL (and BSL + AGPL for active, commercially developed stuff), but the fight will be at least as hard as mainstreaming the gpl was.

meanduck 10y ago

> "Open source, but licensed under the AGPL.", says the article. There is no "but" here. The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. If you have nothing to fear from open source, you have nothing to fear from the AGPL. If you want the project to be openly collabrative but quasi-free, calling it Open Source would be hijacking the term. Call it Social Justice Licence or something.