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That is not the purpose of the AGPL. If you were trying to use the AGPL as some kind of trojan horse to get access to someone's deployment code, then it should

That is not the purpose of the AGPL. If you were trying to use the AGPL as some kind of trojan horse to get access to someone's deployment code, then it should be no surprise that it didn't work. Perhaps your codebase is just hard to contribute to? Is it possible your company has not given enough incentive towards outside developers for them to contribute back? It doesn't even have to be money, it starts with making some mutually beneficial promises and then sticking to them. In general I think it is wrong to try and characterize Amazon's developers as being some kind of strange beasts who have somehow figured out how to use open source better than everyone else. They are the same as every other corporate developer in that they'll always take the easiest and cheapest path to success.

tsimionescu 6y ago
The purpose of the AGPL as envisioned by Stallman is to give you as a user of the network-based software some of the same freedoms that you would have as a user of a local GPL program. This would include the freedom to know what code is running,and the freedom to modify that code and run you own version. The ideal outcome of someone running an AGPL server would be that if you find a bug or if they decide to terminate the service, you can host your own version, so you are not locked in. Unfortunately, it turns out that this freedom is very hard to actually guarantee, as the deployment and monitoring of a server can be as daunting as the actual application logic itself. This is somewhat similar to the case of releasing GPL code without the instructions for building that code, but probably far worse. You seem to have assumed I am personally someone who was bitten by this, which is not the case. I am not even a firm believer in FLOSS values. I am just a by-stander observing how these things are used in practice as opposed to their ideals. By the way, even Mongo's initial use of the AGPL was somewhat counter to the spirit of the thing - they also believed that the deployment part is going to be too hard for many companies, so they hoped that companies would come to them to pay for hosted deployments. If they were using the AGPL according to its spirit, they could have made their own deployment and monitoring scripts public and would have defeated Amazon's lock-in attempts that way (of course they could never do that, their whole purpose was to create that lock-in effect for themselves).

tsimionescu 6y ago

The purpose of the AGPL as envisioned by Stallman is to give you as a user of the network-based software some of the same freedoms that you would have as a user of a local GPL program. This would include the freedom to know what code is running,and the freedom to modify that code and run you own version. The ideal outcome of someone running an AGPL server would be that if you find a bug or if they decide to terminate the service, you can host your own version, so you are not locked in. Unfortunately, it turns out that this freedom is very hard to actually guarantee, as the deployment and monitoring of a server can be as daunting as the actual application logic itself. This is somewhat similar to the case of releasing GPL code without the instructions for building that code, but probably far worse. You seem to have assumed I am personally someone who was bitten by this, which is not the case. I am not even a firm believer in FLOSS values. I am just a by-stander observing how these things are used in practice as opposed to their ideals. By the way, even Mongo's initial use of the AGPL was somewhat counter to the spirit of the thing - they also believed that the deployment part is going to be too hard for many companies, so they hoped that companies would come to them to pay for hosted deployments. If they were using the AGPL according to its spirit, they could have made their own deployment and monitoring scripts public and would have defeated Amazon's lock-in attempts that way (of course they could never do that, their whole purpose was to create that lock-in effect for themselves).