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>It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money As I see it, the purpose of copyleft is not to prevent anyone from making money;

>It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money As I see it, the purpose of copyleft is not to prevent anyone from making money; if someone does want to use a copylefted work to make money, they'll just have to play fair and release their source code under the same license. In other words, what copyleft prevents is predatory use of "open source" which involves taking eagerly without giving back.

geokon 9y ago
Right, but doesn't this ends up giving SaaS and server side businesses a weird kinda-nonsensical advantage? I'm thinking, say you make some innovative new algo using GPL software. If you try to distribute it to your customers you end up having to give away the "secret sauce". You'd have no business b/c anyone can just take your work and recompile it So you only have two solutions: 1 - You run it on your own servers and just provide an API to the "cloud" (ie. what Facebook/Google do with the majority of their software) Then you don't have to share anything! 2 - You redo all the GPL ground work and work from the smaller pool of more permissively licensed software So maybe that's why "cloud" solutions are so huge now? They can reap all the benefits of the GPL world and keep their competitive advantage. But my bigger concern is that there seem to be whole classes of software that can't be put into the cloud - and they're stuck making peanuts (providing "customer support" or whatever companies like RedHat do) or having to do a lot more work. Meanwhile the talent pool gets sucked up working in the cloud b/c it's easier money I'm probably going to step on some toes here, but I have essentially the same concern when it comes to "getting rid of software patents". To me the net effect seems either everything just ends up getting hidden in the cloud or being economically unfeasible.
- untangle 9y ago
  > Right, but doesn't this ends up giving SaaS and server side businesses a weird kinda-nonsensical advantage? Or "appliance" vendors. SaaS and hardware appliances are two delivery mechanisms that leverage loopholes in GPL requirements.
- ralmidani 9y ago
  That's where the AGPL comes in. Of course, Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) providers could hide their use of AGPL code. But the owner of that code could promise a reward for whistleblowers. That would deter most predators from misappropriating AGPL code.

geokon 9y ago

Right, but doesn't this ends up giving SaaS and server side businesses a weird kinda-nonsensical advantage? I'm thinking, say you make some innovative new algo using GPL software. If you try to distribute it to your customers you end up having to give away the "secret sauce". You'd have no business b/c anyone can just take your work and recompile it So you only have two solutions: 1 - You run it on your own servers and just provide an API to the "cloud" (ie. what Facebook/Google do with the majority of their software) Then you don't have to share anything! 2 - You redo all the GPL ground work and work from the smaller pool of more permissively licensed software So maybe that's why "cloud" solutions are so huge now? They can reap all the benefits of the GPL world and keep their competitive advantage. But my bigger concern is that there seem to be whole classes of software that can't be put into the cloud - and they're stuck making peanuts (providing "customer support" or whatever companies like RedHat do) or having to do a lot more work. Meanwhile the talent pool gets sucked up working in the cloud b/c it's easier money I'm probably going to step on some toes here, but I have essentially the same concern when it comes to "getting rid of software patents". To me the net effect seems either everything just ends up getting hidden in the cloud or being economically unfeasible.

untangle 9y ago
> Right, but doesn't this ends up giving SaaS and server side businesses a weird kinda-nonsensical advantage? Or "appliance" vendors. SaaS and hardware appliances are two delivery mechanisms that leverage loopholes in GPL requirements.
ralmidani 9y ago
That's where the AGPL comes in. Of course, Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) providers could hide their use of AGPL code. But the owner of that code could promise a reward for whistleblowers. That would deter most predators from misappropriating AGPL code.