4 ms·

The GPL has no element saying it can't be used to start any kind of business, and I don't think any of its defenders has ever said the GPL's goal is to suppress

by rakoo 6y ago

The GPL has no element saying it can't be used to start any kind of business, and I don't think any of its defenders has ever said the GPL's goal is to suppress that freedom. It seems the FUD is still going strong.

sneak 6y ago
The same people who made the GPL use the term "ASP loophole" and made the AGPL. Not everyone agrees that the freedom to make a SaaS business with a private GPL fork is a loophole or bug. It seems (from their creation of the AGPL and use of terms like "ASP loophole") that the GPL people do.
- posguy 6y ago
  Not everyone has trouble with AGPLv3 being the core of their SaaS business. Just because your core business software is AGPLv3 doesn't mean any other business will be able to build a coherent business model atop it, look at Kazoo by 2600Hz or Iris by Lowes. Knowing how to properly configure and maintain said code in production, creating integrations with third party vendors (that your competition likely can't interact with on the same terms) and marketing to build mindshare among potential customers is a common way to offer your core software as AGPLv3 yet have no competitors or few competitors use your core software.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  But the comment you replied to was about the v2->v3 loophole fixing. That has nothing to do with AGPL, it's about bootloader locking.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  AGPL isn't pro- or anti-SaaS, though. It just says that you have to provide sources to anyone you grant access to the software over a network. So if you host an AGPL database for someone else, they need access to the source code for that database somehow. But it doesn't prohibit you from hosting the database at all. It's the perfect license for MongoDB and all these other companies trying to keep Amazon from taking their software and proprietarizing it... but instead they make weirdly restrictive one-off licenses nobody are going to contribute to.
  - sneak 6y ago
    AGPL restricts developer freedom simply because they launched a webserver on the same machine. There is a legitimate logical argument that the AGPL is not free software.
    - Iolaum 6y ago
      The whole idea behind copyleft, hence free software as Stalman envisioned it, is to restrict the developer's freedom in favour of the user freedom.
    - Pet_Ant 6y ago
      Copt-left licenses are about preserving the users’ freedom. If we want to maximize developers’ freedom then the freest license is proprietary code where you own all the rights and then you can do anything you want and nobody can do anything about it.
      - kmeisthax 6y ago
        No, the license that maximizes developer freedom is a permissive license, like Apache, MIT, BSD 3-clause etc. That lets you mix your code with either a proprietary or a copylefted project. Since a lot of Free Software is written by people who just want to solve a problem for themselves, they often just pick the permissive license. Proprietary code is actually the most restrictive to both users and developers. That's because you can't legally mix proprietary code without a license at every step of the way. Any significantly large proprietary project becomes a mass of third-party dependencies with all sorts of license restrictions that your company is probably ignoring and breaking. Even if you follow all the tenants of those licenses, you don't own your code at the end. A Node-style mess of dependencies becomes ten times worse when each dependency has license restrictions attached to it. In other forms of media, you generally don't see people try to license 30-50 different properties all at once for the same work, because that means nobody owns anything and the work will be really hard to market internationally. Software almost demands this sort of dependency soup, however, which creates all sorts of unique preservation problems. Whenever a large software project (or game engine) is discontinued, a lot of people wonder why the company who wrote it doesn't just release the code as Free for third parties to maintain. The answer is that in most cases, it's not their code to release.

by rakoo 6y ago

sneak 6y ago

The same people who made the GPL use the term "ASP loophole" and made the AGPL. Not everyone agrees that the freedom to make a SaaS business with a private GPL fork is a loophole or bug. It seems (from their creation of the AGPL and use of terms like "ASP loophole") that the GPL people do.

posguy 6y ago
Not everyone has trouble with AGPLv3 being the core of their SaaS business. Just because your core business software is AGPLv3 doesn't mean any other business will be able to build a coherent business model atop it, look at Kazoo by 2600Hz or Iris by Lowes. Knowing how to properly configure and maintain said code in production, creating integrations with third party vendors (that your competition likely can't interact with on the same terms) and marketing to build mindshare among potential customers is a common way to offer your core software as AGPLv3 yet have no competitors or few competitors use your core software.
Dylan16807 6y ago
But the comment you replied to was about the v2->v3 loophole fixing. That has nothing to do with AGPL, it's about bootloader locking.
kmeisthax 6y ago
AGPL isn't pro- or anti-SaaS, though. It just says that you have to provide sources to anyone you grant access to the software over a network. So if you host an AGPL database for someone else, they need access to the source code for that database somehow. But it doesn't prohibit you from hosting the database at all. It's the perfect license for MongoDB and all these other companies trying to keep Amazon from taking their software and proprietarizing it... but instead they make weirdly restrictive one-off licenses nobody are going to contribute to.
- sneak 6y ago
  AGPL restricts developer freedom simply because they launched a webserver on the same machine. There is a legitimate logical argument that the AGPL is not free software.
  - Iolaum 6y ago
    The whole idea behind copyleft, hence free software as Stalman envisioned it, is to restrict the developer's freedom in favour of the user freedom.
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    Copt-left licenses are about preserving the users’ freedom. If we want to maximize developers’ freedom then the freest license is proprietary code where you own all the rights and then you can do anything you want and nobody can do anything about it.
    - kmeisthax 6y ago
      No, the license that maximizes developer freedom is a permissive license, like Apache, MIT, BSD 3-clause etc. That lets you mix your code with either a proprietary or a copylefted project. Since a lot of Free Software is written by people who just want to solve a problem for themselves, they often just pick the permissive license. Proprietary code is actually the most restrictive to both users and developers. That's because you can't legally mix proprietary code without a license at every step of the way. Any significantly large proprietary project becomes a mass of third-party dependencies with all sorts of license restrictions that your company is probably ignoring and breaking. Even if you follow all the tenants of those licenses, you don't own your code at the end. A Node-style mess of dependencies becomes ten times worse when each dependency has license restrictions attached to it. In other forms of media, you generally don't see people try to license 30-50 different properties all at once for the same work, because that means nobody owns anything and the work will be really hard to market internationally. Software almost demands this sort of dependency soup, however, which creates all sorts of unique preservation problems. Whenever a large software project (or game engine) is discontinued, a lot of people wonder why the company who wrote it doesn't just release the code as Free for third parties to maintain. The answer is that in most cases, it's not their code to release.