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That's a perfectly valid choice. Other people's choice to avoid corporations from adopting the project without giving anything in return is also a perfectly va

That's a perfectly valid choice. Other people's choice to avoid corporations from adopting the project without giving anything in return is also a perfectly valid choice. (You have a higher chance of having your project become globally used, other people value that less than pull requests and/or money. And that's fine.)

kazinator 7y ago
The AGPL burdens you with requirements related to simply running the program, even if you're not a money-making corporation. Say you want to put up some wiki or something, for some volunteer organization of yours. If you run some AGPL thing and customize it in any way, you're burdened with having to serve everyone the code. Come on, are you saying that if some corporation uses your program that took ten man-years of effort, and re-distributes the code due to making some trivial one-line change, then they have given something adequate in return? If you don't like corporations using stuff for free, then just put a proper shareware license on it: "free for non-commercial use". The motivation for the AGPL isn't about giving back to the community; it's just a wrongheaded attempt to attack the problems caused by SaaS. Namely, that users are tied to using programs whose installation is on remote equipment they don't control, and whose behaviors are a blackbox.
- bigiain 7y ago
  > you're burdened with having to serve everyone the code. Yes, if that’s the option the author of the code chose. You are free to choose some other code, or write your own. You have zero entitlement to use somebody else’s code under conditions that suit you, over the wishes of the author. It makes no difference whether the author(s) chose AGPL for reasons you like it not, or if they did it out of philosophical purity or spite. They get to choose. You get to choose whether to use their code or not under the rights and conditions they grant you. Google have clearly worked this out and codified it in their policies. If you think that’s putting some overly heavy burden on you, that doesn’t change anything. Choose some other code or write some yourself. Nobody owes you the right to use their code. Sorry.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    > You have zero entitlement to use somebody else’s code under conditions that suit you. Note that this sort of rhetoric is eerily familiar from the world of proprietary software; and is largely absent in truly free software contexts (BSD, MIT, ...). When similar entitlement talk comes up, it's usually in terms such as not being entitled to free support (coding or whatever) in regard to something available "as is".
    - bigiain 7y ago
      > and is largely absent in truly free software contexts I curious about what you mean by "truely free software"? My impression is there's a divide in "non-proprietary" software philosophies, with Stallman out one end of the bellcurve on the "free as in speech" side, and perhaps ESR out toward the other end closer to "free as in beer". That's also close to the divide between "free software" and "open source software" in my head. There re people who are perfectly happy to give huge codebases away with almost no restrictions (for me the champion of this would be Larry Wall and the Artistic Licence/GPL dual licensing he uses for perl), while there are other people who are more politically or "freedom" motivated (like Stallman, who champions AGPL like viralality because he believes its "right" and "socially good"). Trying desperately to escape either of those outcomes are organisations (for whom I have a lot of sympathy) like MondoDB and RedisLabs, who are trying to build business models around large/expensive codebases and getting undercut by "the cloud industry" who've found legal but probably unintended holes in the licenses they released under. I don't know if RedisLabs' RASL or MongoDB's SSPL will work out long term. I kinda hope they do, because I think it'll allow a new kind of OpenSource/FreeSoftware to exist - projects the require a team of engineers getting salaries paid to do the engineering - allowing software to be created on a scale that loosely connected groups of individuals are unlikely to be able to achieve. (I know the Linux kernel is an obvious counter-example to that claim, but it's an outlier in the vast sea of open source and free software projects out there.) (And, regardless of the implications of works like "rhetoric" and "entitlement", I can't see how _anybody_ could argue against a code/project author being able to use whatever licensing they choose - including whatever restrictions that places on people who want to use that code. Copyright law allows them to refuse you to use their code at all. Any further rights they grant you in a license are not something almost any other creative industry grants. Nobody realistically complains about the burden LucasFilm is imposing on them by the choice of what rights they grant you to use StarWars copyrighted story/theme/images/whatever - you can't show StarWars to people for free just because you're a volunteer or non profit organisation. Why should someone else's C/Python/Java/Rust code be any different?)

kazinator 7y ago

The AGPL burdens you with requirements related to simply running the program, even if you're not a money-making corporation. Say you want to put up some wiki or something, for some volunteer organization of yours. If you run some AGPL thing and customize it in any way, you're burdened with having to serve everyone the code. Come on, are you saying that if some corporation uses your program that took ten man-years of effort, and re-distributes the code due to making some trivial one-line change, then they have given something adequate in return? If you don't like corporations using stuff for free, then just put a proper shareware license on it: "free for non-commercial use". The motivation for the AGPL isn't about giving back to the community; it's just a wrongheaded attempt to attack the problems caused by SaaS. Namely, that users are tied to using programs whose installation is on remote equipment they don't control, and whose behaviors are a blackbox.

bigiain 7y ago
> you're burdened with having to serve everyone the code. Yes, if that’s the option the author of the code chose. You are free to choose some other code, or write your own. You have zero entitlement to use somebody else’s code under conditions that suit you, over the wishes of the author. It makes no difference whether the author(s) chose AGPL for reasons you like it not, or if they did it out of philosophical purity or spite. They get to choose. You get to choose whether to use their code or not under the rights and conditions they grant you. Google have clearly worked this out and codified it in their policies. If you think that’s putting some overly heavy burden on you, that doesn’t change anything. Choose some other code or write some yourself. Nobody owes you the right to use their code. Sorry.
- kazinator 7y ago
  > You have zero entitlement to use somebody else’s code under conditions that suit you. Note that this sort of rhetoric is eerily familiar from the world of proprietary software; and is largely absent in truly free software contexts (BSD, MIT, ...). When similar entitlement talk comes up, it's usually in terms such as not being entitled to free support (coding or whatever) in regard to something available "as is".
  - bigiain 7y ago
    > and is largely absent in truly free software contexts I curious about what you mean by "truely free software"? My impression is there's a divide in "non-proprietary" software philosophies, with Stallman out one end of the bellcurve on the "free as in speech" side, and perhaps ESR out toward the other end closer to "free as in beer". That's also close to the divide between "free software" and "open source software" in my head. There re people who are perfectly happy to give huge codebases away with almost no restrictions (for me the champion of this would be Larry Wall and the Artistic Licence/GPL dual licensing he uses for perl), while there are other people who are more politically or "freedom" motivated (like Stallman, who champions AGPL like viralality because he believes its "right" and "socially good"). Trying desperately to escape either of those outcomes are organisations (for whom I have a lot of sympathy) like MondoDB and RedisLabs, who are trying to build business models around large/expensive codebases and getting undercut by "the cloud industry" who've found legal but probably unintended holes in the licenses they released under. I don't know if RedisLabs' RASL or MongoDB's SSPL will work out long term. I kinda hope they do, because I think it'll allow a new kind of OpenSource/FreeSoftware to exist - projects the require a team of engineers getting salaries paid to do the engineering - allowing software to be created on a scale that loosely connected groups of individuals are unlikely to be able to achieve. (I know the Linux kernel is an obvious counter-example to that claim, but it's an outlier in the vast sea of open source and free software projects out there.) (And, regardless of the implications of works like "rhetoric" and "entitlement", I can't see how _anybody_ could argue against a code/project author being able to use whatever licensing they choose - including whatever restrictions that places on people who want to use that code. Copyright law allows them to refuse you to use their code at all. Any further rights they grant you in a license are not something almost any other creative industry grants. Nobody realistically complains about the burden LucasFilm is imposing on them by the choice of what rights they grant you to use StarWars copyrighted story/theme/images/whatever - you can't show StarWars to people for free just because you're a volunteer or non profit organisation. Why should someone else's C/Python/Java/Rust code be any different?)