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Business friendliness is not an ideological choice. Maybe a careless choice or a calculated one. But I don't think anyone has strong beliefs in it. Hence, the O

Business friendliness is not an ideological choice. Maybe a careless choice or a calculated one. But I don't think anyone has strong beliefs in it. Hence, the OSI side is fighting with an agenda. FSF, on the other hand, is ideologically strong, people hold genuine beliefs and fight for those beliefs. Well, not lately. As it turns out, FSF is not ideologically strong enough to take on modern issues and is ok for companies to wrap and build around free software to offer it as services, but never release any of the supporting code, forcing users into a proprietary lock-in, because they cannot run similar services without all of that extra code. So, here we are, in a need for stronger ideology. And even though this is also agenda driven of smaller companies, startups trying to protect themselves from bigger companies, there is still a lot to believe in.

sanderjd 8y ago
I dunno, I believe pretty strongly that it is a good thing for software businesses to be able to prosper. If that's not an ideology, I'm not sure how it is distinct from one. I don't think it's a careless choice; I've thought about it and actively concluded that I believe businesses are generally a good thing (note: not always, but generally). Maybe it is a calculated choice because one of the reasons I'm in favor of businesses is that they are how I employ myself and earn a living. But that's not the only reason; I may work in the public sector one day, but in all likelihood I will still believe that businesses are generally a good thing. It's just a belief that I hold. Is that an ideology? I don't know, but it seems like it might be.
jacques_chester 8y ago
I don't think that's a fair statement of the FSF's position. From the horse's mouth: > Early drafts of GPLv3 allowed licensors to add an Affero-like requirement to publish source in section 7. However, some companies that develop and rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement. By publishing the GNU Affero GPLv3 as a separate license, with provisions in it and GPLv3 to allow code under these licenses to link to each other, we accomplish all of our original goals while making it easier to determine which code has the source publication requirement. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero The "administrative burden" is not academic, by the way. Where I work we spend a lot of time and money checking that we are compliant with every license pulled in directly or indirectly into our products.
- kemitchell 8y ago
  Administrative burden isn't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, either. GPLv2/3-style copyleft gets forgone all the time on pure process grounds. It's nontrivial to identify which permissive licenses apply to some bag of artifacts an engineer dug up online. FSF faced fork threats when it floated AGPL-GPL merger in GPLv3.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    > Administrative burden isn't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, either. I didn't mean to imply that. The AGPL however greatly expands the scope of folks to whom the burden applies. Some companies can basically just look for AGPL to exclude because they don't distribute anything. Others (like us) must check everything.
zanny 8y ago
I do honestly agree that the FSF position has weakened over the years. I personally am more IP-liberation minded, but I more generally want some apparatus whereby I can inspect, modify, and reuse the software running on physical devices I own in totality. Its better for society as a whole to be information-positive than negative in the general case, and that applies to IP in general as well. The FSF has made way too many compromises over the years about, say, hard drive firmware or monitor firmware or "single use device" firmware to be ideologically rigorous. If a device is in such a condition that you cannot modify code running on it, the impetus should be to move towards mandating devices be reprogrammable - even if it means desoldering a chip and reprogramming it via FPGA. To this day I'm not entirely sure where such an ideology should fall, but the general availability of all code in use combined with other societal improvements like a minimum standard of living would enable users to improve their own devices collaboratively and organically. Its how almost all learning and innovation in the past came about, before we siloed ourselves off in private to try to outrace the lowest hanging fruit against everyone else in tandem with wanton waste of time and resources to capitalize on artificial state scarcity apparatuses as a source of profit. Its really gross to think about.

sanderjd 8y ago

I dunno, I believe pretty strongly that it is a good thing for software businesses to be able to prosper. If that's not an ideology, I'm not sure how it is distinct from one. I don't think it's a careless choice; I've thought about it and actively concluded that I believe businesses are generally a good thing (note: not always, but generally). Maybe it is a calculated choice because one of the reasons I'm in favor of businesses is that they are how I employ myself and earn a living. But that's not the only reason; I may work in the public sector one day, but in all likelihood I will still believe that businesses are generally a good thing. It's just a belief that I hold. Is that an ideology? I don't know, but it seems like it might be.

jacques_chester 8y ago

I don't think that's a fair statement of the FSF's position. From the horse's mouth: > Early drafts of GPLv3 allowed licensors to add an Affero-like requirement to publish source in section 7. However, some companies that develop and rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement. By publishing the GNU Affero GPLv3 as a separate license, with provisions in it and GPLv3 to allow code under these licenses to link to each other, we accomplish all of our original goals while making it easier to determine which code has the source publication requirement. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero The "administrative burden" is not academic, by the way. Where I work we spend a lot of time and money checking that we are compliant with every license pulled in directly or indirectly into our products.

kemitchell 8y ago
Administrative burden isn't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, either. GPLv2/3-style copyleft gets forgone all the time on pure process grounds. It's nontrivial to identify which permissive licenses apply to some bag of artifacts an engineer dug up online. FSF faced fork threats when it floated AGPL-GPL merger in GPLv3.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  > Administrative burden isn't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, either. I didn't mean to imply that. The AGPL however greatly expands the scope of folks to whom the burden applies. Some companies can basically just look for AGPL to exclude because they don't distribute anything. Others (like us) must check everything.

zanny 8y ago

I do honestly agree that the FSF position has weakened over the years. I personally am more IP-liberation minded, but I more generally want some apparatus whereby I can inspect, modify, and reuse the software running on physical devices I own in totality. Its better for society as a whole to be information-positive than negative in the general case, and that applies to IP in general as well. The FSF has made way too many compromises over the years about, say, hard drive firmware or monitor firmware or "single use device" firmware to be ideologically rigorous. If a device is in such a condition that you cannot modify code running on it, the impetus should be to move towards mandating devices be reprogrammable - even if it means desoldering a chip and reprogramming it via FPGA. To this day I'm not entirely sure where such an ideology should fall, but the general availability of all code in use combined with other societal improvements like a minimum standard of living would enable users to improve their own devices collaboratively and organically. Its how almost all learning and innovation in the past came about, before we siloed ourselves off in private to try to outrace the lowest hanging fruit against everyone else in tandem with wanton waste of time and resources to capitalize on artificial state scarcity apparatuses as a source of profit. Its really gross to think about.