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I think what people mean when they say GPL-licensed software business does not work is not that GPL denies charging in any legal manner but that it's very hard

I think what people mean when they say GPL-licensed software business does not work is not that GPL denies charging in any legal manner but that it's very hard to deny free of charge use while protecting freedom of use. And if you don't deny free of charge use, you will have hard time doing business. Many enterprises (all?) have a procurement process which requires to look for a cheaper or a free alternative. If you provide Mongo under AGPL, it will be harder to get a company to buy a subscription. Procurement officer will nag you with questions why should we pay if there is a free alternative (that's what you call market cannibalization)? Support is the thing that usually gets a procurement through but that effectively cancels all the "unicorn" growth (if most revenues come from support contracts as opposed to licenses) and essentially puts you outside the "blue ocean" because human support does not scale as software can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy Edit: someone mentioned AWS Linux and k8s below, I think it's really off in business terms. Those things are open and free in order to "commoditize the complement" https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement

marcinzm 6y ago
>Procurement officer will nag you with questions why should we pay if there is a free alternative (that's what you call market cannibalization)? Because their legal department prohibits them from running AGPL code :). That's a side reason for non-standard open source licenses I suspect. The hassle of getting legal to approve them is more than the cost of just paying for a commercial license.
- smarx007 6y ago
  No, I was saying that procurement will tell you to use Mongo under AGPL (the free alternative) and not to embed it in the app (if you can). What I meant is that procurement takes OSS-licensed code as a "given" and carefully considers what they get on top of the base product when they pay money (while developers often think that they are charging for the whole thing, but in "enterprise" context). And that is where the blue ocean ends. Independent of that, you are completely right that most serious companies view non-standard free/"free" licenses as commercial and simply consider those as non-OSS products just like they would otherwise.

marcinzm 6y ago

>Procurement officer will nag you with questions why should we pay if there is a free alternative (that's what you call market cannibalization)? Because their legal department prohibits them from running AGPL code :). That's a side reason for non-standard open source licenses I suspect. The hassle of getting legal to approve them is more than the cost of just paying for a commercial license.

smarx007 6y ago
No, I was saying that procurement will tell you to use Mongo under AGPL (the free alternative) and not to embed it in the app (if you can). What I meant is that procurement takes OSS-licensed code as a "given" and carefully considers what they get on top of the base product when they pay money (while developers often think that they are charging for the whole thing, but in "enterprise" context). And that is where the blue ocean ends. Independent of that, you are completely right that most serious companies view non-standard free/"free" licenses as commercial and simply consider those as non-OSS products just like they would otherwise.