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All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. Thi

by asim 6y ago

All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. This is not some nefarious plan to screw over the community. It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die and these projects would slowly rot. Hopefully over time rather than having everyone choose their own licenses we end up with some form of standardisation.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> Hopefully over time rather than having everyone choose their own licenses we end up with some form of standardisation. Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license. > If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die and these projects would slowly rot. It sounds like you're suggesting that anything but hard-copyleft is doomed to die out, which is a somewhat hard argument to make in a world with lots of counterexamples (postgres, the assorted BSD OSs, kubernetes, Android).
- nine_k 6y ago
  Postgres looks like the only interesting entry here. K8s and Android have a major corporation backing them, which extracts value from them in its internal operation anyway. They are such products that using them by competition commoditizes said competition. Android on like 95% of phones outside China has very important proprietary parts, making it hardly compatible with a bunch of top-tier apps. BSD OSes don't do excessively well, with regard to market share and mind share. They are reasonably healthy though.
  - gen220 6y ago
    SQLite, Vim/Emacs, Linux, everything in GNU coreutils. All of the Apache projects (some to more/less an extant than others). Most programming language implementations (e.g. CPython). Memcached. WireGuard. SQLAlchemy. Web Frameworks like Flask, Django, Rails, on and on. There are many open source technologies that do not seek to capture the value they create with licensing hijinks. I don’t think it’s an accident, that the ones that persist across generations are generally not structured as VC-backed firms, who care a great deal more about “value capture” than the average programmer capable of building such foundational systems. Usually “value capture” is correlated with “consumer harm”, and so they’re replaced over time. From your example, K8s will definitely outlive Google. Hard to say about Android.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      > From your example, K8s will definitely outlive Google. Hard to say about Android. What leads you to say that? I wouldn't be surprised if kubernetes is dead in 20 years. I would be very surprised if google is dead in 20 years.
      - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
        Frankly I'd be surprised if Kubernetes wasn't dead in 20 years.
        ethbr0 6y ago
        Imho, K8s eventually evolves into an OS for running K8s, then gets productized on {non-x86-64}
        edoceo 6y ago
        not looking forward to the k8s-arm-soc enabled bootloader (tightly integrated to systemd of course) to run k8s-os to run k8s-system to run docker.
      - gen220 6y ago
        It’s just my opinion and I’ll be happy to be wrong (because it means something better will have supplanted it). But I don’t think there’s a significantly-simpler, mature abstraction for doing container orchestration, than K8s. K8s’ main advantage/stickiness factor, is how abstract and modular it is. It’s an opinionated Kernel that gets most things right and has a huge ecosystem of tools built around this kernel. It has a very similar set of stickiness factors to Linux, imo, although the origin story couldn’t be more different of course. I think if anything replaces K8s, it’ll take a Linux-like shape. But K8s gets enough things correct (licensing, api, modularity) that it’ll be hard to replace it wholesale.
    - valyala 6y ago
      I fully support this statement. I'm core developer of open-source monitoring solution - VictoriaMetrics [1]. It is licensed under Apache 2 and we have no plans to change the license, since it may complicate user experience. VictoriaMetrics makes "value capture" by more future-proof means: * By providing easy-to-setup-and-operate solution * By focusing on the performance and minimal resource usage * By providing good integration with other monitoring solutions [1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics
  - yarcob 6y ago
    Well, OpenSSH for example is an OpenBSD project, so it's not like nobody uses their stuff.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      Everybody does! Some likely even publicly deploy modified versions without upstreaming them. But the authors don't mind, and don't ask for payment.
  - atat7024 6y ago
    "What people want" is not what I want. Market share/mindshare is almost an inverse measure of quality at this point!
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      This is what might be described as the 'hipster' sentiment distilled to its base axiom. Not necessarily knocking it, though!
      - topaz0 6y ago
        It's only hipster sentiment if it is on principle ("this is popular -> I don't want it"). It sounds to me like just an observation in this case ("it so happens that the most popular things are the ones I want least"). The "almost" clarifies this.
    - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
      Market share/mindshare is almost an inverse measure of quality at this point! If you only compare things above a certain quality threshold, That's true of any creative endeavor. Not too many people will say that Mcdonald's has the best burgers, or the pop singer of the week is their absolute favorite.
- bostik 6y ago
  Your choice of counterexamples highlights an important aspect. Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Android as a strategic advantage across a global market, Kubernetes as a plumbing layer enabling more businesses operate logically like Google. Sure, it's a CNCF product since 2016 or so, but it still enjoys Google's backing. Postgres? They have a very specific governance model - a single company can not employ over 50% of the core contributors, to guarantee that the direction of the product is not taken over even by accident.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Governance won't help if you have no contributors at all because there's no revenue coming in.
  - lacker 6y ago
    Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Is that really "outlier" behavior? More and more important open source projects are prominently backed by a single large tech company. React, TensorFlow, TypeScript, Go, etc. If you just look at the last decade, there has been more important work done as "single-sponsor open source" than under the GPL.
    - cardanome 6y ago
      A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare. Those projects have ultimately the interests of the corporations in mind not of the users. Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering! Sure many of them happen to be useful and are simply for increasing the prestige of the company but let's not act like it is a good thing.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        If we want to bark up this tree, a larger problem is FAANG inventing technologies that assume you have equivalent baseline competency and maturity. Which leads to companies that do not (eg no CICD or data architecture standard) adopting tools that assume they do (k8s & tensorflow). (And yes, I realize this is because most folks who work at the former aspire to jump ship to the latter) Say what you want about Microsoft, but they do a much better job of meeting the customer where they are (dumpster fire) instead of where Microsoft is.
- swyx 6y ago
  > using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license license noob here - can you elaborate on why exactly it is so much better?
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    AGPL is a license qualifying the criteria of OSI's OpenSource definition and FSF's Free Software definition. A key point there is that a user can use the software quite freely without restrictions only with the caveat that modifications have to be made available to users. (AGPL is slighqtly more complex) Many of the "modern" licenses allow to look at code, but prevent distribution and/or modification and/or usage. They typically aim for any "proper" usage requiring a commercial license and not giving the guarantee that code can be fixed in case the original vendor stops working on it.
    - bosswipe 6y ago
      I don't value OSI's stamp of approval since they were explicitly founded to coopt FSF's effort and make it more corporate friendly. Obviously corporate lawyers would disagree with me. A license that allows all typical freedoms except "use the software to start a SaaS using proprietary infrastructure" is fine by me.
      - ufo 6y ago
        While there are significant ideological disagreements between the OSI and FSF, when it comes to FOSS licenses their definitions are mostly equivalent. There are very few licenses that are recognized by the OSI but not by the FSF, and vice-versa.
      - klelatti 6y ago
        Proprietary infrastructure = All infrastructure essentially. So you're fine with a license that can't be used for SaaS. So basically you're happy for the commercial internet to be powered by proprietary software - with all that would mean for free software.
- api 6y ago
  Problem: the letters "G, P, L" are toxic to a huge number of companies. This has nothing to do with the controversy around Stallman. It's because Microsoft spent over a billion dollars in the 1990s mis-educating the market that GPL software is "viral" and if present can "infect" non-GPL software with the GPL license. The problem would go away if you renamed the license to something else. It's that stupid. A lot of the flavor of the week licenses exist for this reason, as well as to address some of the weak corner cases of the AGPL.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    The GPL is neither long nor complex. If a company won’t use GPL software because of Microsoft’s efforts, but would use that software under an identical license called something else, I think that company will experience many other difficulties on their journey as well. For shrink-wrap software, GPL can be an issue. For hosted software, it’s generally not (which is why all the desire to make other licenses, including AGPL).
  - slabity 6y ago
    > A lot of the flavor of the week licenses exist for this reason, as well as to address some of the weak corner cases of the AGPL. I'm interested in what the 'weak corner cases' of AGPL are considering it was pretty much made to correct some weaknesses in the GPL.
    - api 6y ago
      It doesn't adequately handle the SaaSification case, which is when someone hosts the software behind a paywall. It only handles the "Tivoization" case when someone ships the software inside a closed source box.
      - slabity 6y ago
        Isn't the purpose of GPLv3 to handle Tivoization and AGPL was made to handle server-side sort of use-cases? If I use AGPL-licensed software in a SaaS type of environment, I still need to release the source-code even if I'm not distributing the software directly, correct?
- api 6y ago
  Anything not hard-copyleft (GPL, AGPL) or source-available (BSL etc.) is going to be embraced, extended, and SaaSified / paywalled. Eventually the open version might get abandoned since its authors will get tired of providing free labor to billion dollar cloud companies. I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    > I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components. And that seems fine, at least if you subscribe to the Unix philosophy of composability. Honestly, I love Django, but for some projects I'd love even more to use just Django's ORM without all the other stuff (which I also like, but is irrelevant for some projects).
  - dcow 6y ago
    If you use a GPL library then your main work becomes GPL.
    - tarsinge 6y ago
      We are talking about products here.
    - rover0 6y ago
      If you use a GPL library and don't make the main work GPL you're committing copyright infingement. Your work will never magically become GPL.
    - da_chicken 6y ago
      That's true -- well, you're obligated to release the work under GPL -- but quite a lot of libraries are LGPL licensed which allows a proprietary application to link to it.
  - valyala 6y ago
    IMHO, companies change their product licenses from BSD-like licenses to custom source-available licenses because of the fear they couldn't compete on the market. The license change doesn't protect the company from losing the market. Moreover, it increases the speed of company abandonment because of bad public message. Full disclosure: I'm CTO at VictoriaMetrics [1], we are happy with Apache 2 license and have no plans to change it. [1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/ https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/
- soenkeliebau 6y ago
  >Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license. I'm not sure I agree. Yes, standardization is a good thing and AGPL is the "known evil", but having read it I do think that it is a very very complex piece of text - personally I'd go so far as to say that it is close to incomprehensible and would prefer pretty much anything else. But even aside from that the sheer number of companies that point blank ban AGPL licensed software from being used in their stack could be used as an indicator as well. Though this may be due to the common misunderstanding that it is a viral license, which just goes back to my prior point on it not being clearly worded. I won't even mention alternatives, I'm sure they all have issues, it is a complex topic, but if it were up to me the AGPL would not be my first license choice.
  - platz 6y ago
    If companies want to ban AGPL, well that's their perogative. Alternatively, catering to those companies wouldn't bring relevant benefits to the project anyway
    - viraptor 6y ago
      There are corps which have a (close to) blanket ban on AGPL, but still submit patches to open source projects. HP would be one of them. I don't think it's a big loss though.
    - soenkeliebau 6y ago
      Arguably selling support/services to a company using that product would help pay for developers that work on the product, which to me sounds like a benefit. With the AGPL that would require dual licensing, and that draws flak as well. I think the notion that OSS means there cannot be any money involved simply cannot hold true anymore these days. Software has become extremely complex and requires dedicated developers working on it - and they need to eat. We are currently seeing a lot of companies changing their licensing model for a reason - because there is not currently a middle ground between OSS and a working business modell that the OSS crowd doesn't hate. That being said, I'd love to be proven wrong here!
  - 6y ago
- cryptonector 6y ago
  Open source is a business tool. There are many business models where open source can be useful. PG has such a vibrant user _and_ developer community that it pays to be a freelancer in that community and there's room for lots to play. SQLite3 is very much the opposite: it has _no_ developer community outside the core team, but the business model is the SQLite Consortium, which pays for the core team, and the closed-source test suite whose existence prevents hard forks. It makes sense to use attractive-to-end-users licensing at first and later switch to a license that helps lock in support bucks. Call it bait-n-switch if you like, but even the SQLite folks did it, only they didn't do it with the _license_ but with the _test suite_ -- either way they made it really difficult to play in their space and/or fork.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
echelon 6y ago
If they don't, Amazon will gobble them up. This is a good thing. Linux being GPL 2 was great for computing when we had thick clients, but now everything is moving to the cloud. Companies can innovate on top of it and not really give back.
josephcsible 6y ago
This seems to lump relicensing to better FOSS licenses like AGPL in with relicensing to bad non-FOSS licenses like the Commons Clause, SSPL, BSL, Redis Source Available License, and Anti-996 License. You're right about the former, but the latter is screwing over the community.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  Serious question: How is the community impacted by SSPl, BSL, etc? The average end-user who makes no modifications and is not reselling as-a-service is fine, there is no additional burden with either AGPL or the non-OSI-compliant licenses. How does the AGPL screw over the community less than the other licenses? AGPL is problematic for a slew of reasons, lots of corporations (whether or not you agree that for-profit enterprises make up the bulk of the "community" is a separate discussion) disallow it entirely (mostly thanks to Google's precedent).
  - gibba999 6y ago
    The community is impacted because there isn't an intellectual commons to build from. The OSI or FSF-approved licenses form an ecosystem. I can have a project which mixes AGPL, GPL, and BSD code. I can make that part of the next version of Ubuntu. I can borrow bits of code. It all works together. If the goal is to have a computer running free software, AGPL builds towards that goal. If the goal is to use the code in new and unexpected ways, AGPL builds there. The non-OSI licenses are walled gardens. Even the ones which nominally allow remixing require me to drop a few grand on a lawyer before remixing them (more grand if it's international). AGPL is toxic to some corporations for mixing into their proprietary projects, but the commercial dual-license takes care of that. Most corporations don't mind spending money. AGPL also gives a long-term sustainable pathway if the original vendor goes under or goes evil.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Blocking competition among providers of your app as a service is a burden for users. Users would benefit from being allowed to use the provider which best meets their needs, rather than being forced to use the provider who happens to be allied with the copyright owner. AGPL tries to ensure that third-party providers are at least sharing their development efforts to the same extent that those efforts were shared with them. AGPL doesn't try to give anyone an unfair advantage at providing the software as a service, not even the copyright owner.
judofyr 6y ago
> All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. […] It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. Ahem: Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-series-b-for-open-source-developer-platform/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-... I completely support the right to chose your own license and how you want to sell and use your own code, but let's be honest here. This is done because investors have discovered that it's possible to earn money on services around Open Source products, and Grafana Labs has gone all-in on this approach. Now they need the relicensing in order for the business model to remain viable. We're lucky that the code remains AGPL, but notice that they are still not committed to ensuring that all the code will remain AGPL (i.e. they still want CLA so they can relicense later).
- staticassertion 6y ago
  > Now they need the relicensing in order for the business model to remain viable. This is exactly what the parent is saying though. They're going through this process to ensure that their business remains viable and they can continue to build and support the project.
  - judofyr 6y ago
    I still think this sentence here is not quite precise enough: > All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. To me this sounds like the relicensing is done so that a few programmers finally can get paid for their hard labor while maintaining critical software we're all using. What's actually happening here is that some creators have convinced a few investors that they'll be able to give a huge return on invest by building up a sales department around the product. And now the realize that they're not able to accomplishing that with their original license. It's a perfectly acceptable business strategy, but it's not necessarily the only way of running an open source project. I'm still hoping that we (the open source community) can find even better ways of ensuring high-quality software remain open source without being so dependent on current mindset of investors.
throwaway823882 6y ago
> If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die Good riddance. Incumbents owned by corporations have too much control and prevent replacement projects from arising. When a community builds a solution, how it works is dictated by its users and developers, not profits.
29athrowaway 6y ago
And each one of them will be forked by the major companies that were supposed to pay.

by asim 6y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> Hopefully over time rather than having everyone choose their own licenses we end up with some form of standardisation. Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license. > If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die and these projects would slowly rot. It sounds like you're suggesting that anything but hard-copyleft is doomed to die out, which is a somewhat hard argument to make in a world with lots of counterexamples (postgres, the assorted BSD OSs, kubernetes, Android).

nine_k 6y ago
Postgres looks like the only interesting entry here. K8s and Android have a major corporation backing them, which extracts value from them in its internal operation anyway. They are such products that using them by competition commoditizes said competition. Android on like 95% of phones outside China has very important proprietary parts, making it hardly compatible with a bunch of top-tier apps. BSD OSes don't do excessively well, with regard to market share and mind share. They are reasonably healthy though.
- gen220 6y ago
  SQLite, Vim/Emacs, Linux, everything in GNU coreutils. All of the Apache projects (some to more/less an extant than others). Most programming language implementations (e.g. CPython). Memcached. WireGuard. SQLAlchemy. Web Frameworks like Flask, Django, Rails, on and on. There are many open source technologies that do not seek to capture the value they create with licensing hijinks. I don’t think it’s an accident, that the ones that persist across generations are generally not structured as VC-backed firms, who care a great deal more about “value capture” than the average programmer capable of building such foundational systems. Usually “value capture” is correlated with “consumer harm”, and so they’re replaced over time. From your example, K8s will definitely outlive Google. Hard to say about Android.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > From your example, K8s will definitely outlive Google. Hard to say about Android. What leads you to say that? I wouldn't be surprised if kubernetes is dead in 20 years. I would be very surprised if google is dead in 20 years.
    - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
      Frankly I'd be surprised if Kubernetes wasn't dead in 20 years.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        Imho, K8s eventually evolves into an OS for running K8s, then gets productized on {non-x86-64}
        edoceo 6y ago
        not looking forward to the k8s-arm-soc enabled bootloader (tightly integrated to systemd of course) to run k8s-os to run k8s-system to run docker.
    - gen220 6y ago
      It’s just my opinion and I’ll be happy to be wrong (because it means something better will have supplanted it). But I don’t think there’s a significantly-simpler, mature abstraction for doing container orchestration, than K8s. K8s’ main advantage/stickiness factor, is how abstract and modular it is. It’s an opinionated Kernel that gets most things right and has a huge ecosystem of tools built around this kernel. It has a very similar set of stickiness factors to Linux, imo, although the origin story couldn’t be more different of course. I think if anything replaces K8s, it’ll take a Linux-like shape. But K8s gets enough things correct (licensing, api, modularity) that it’ll be hard to replace it wholesale.
  - valyala 6y ago
    I fully support this statement. I'm core developer of open-source monitoring solution - VictoriaMetrics [1]. It is licensed under Apache 2 and we have no plans to change the license, since it may complicate user experience. VictoriaMetrics makes "value capture" by more future-proof means: * By providing easy-to-setup-and-operate solution * By focusing on the performance and minimal resource usage * By providing good integration with other monitoring solutions [1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics
- yarcob 6y ago
  Well, OpenSSH for example is an OpenBSD project, so it's not like nobody uses their stuff.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Everybody does! Some likely even publicly deploy modified versions without upstreaming them. But the authors don't mind, and don't ask for payment.
- atat7024 6y ago
  "What people want" is not what I want. Market share/mindshare is almost an inverse measure of quality at this point!
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    This is what might be described as the 'hipster' sentiment distilled to its base axiom. Not necessarily knocking it, though!
    - topaz0 6y ago
      It's only hipster sentiment if it is on principle ("this is popular -> I don't want it"). It sounds to me like just an observation in this case ("it so happens that the most popular things are the ones I want least"). The "almost" clarifies this.
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    Market share/mindshare is almost an inverse measure of quality at this point! If you only compare things above a certain quality threshold, That's true of any creative endeavor. Not too many people will say that Mcdonald's has the best burgers, or the pop singer of the week is their absolute favorite.
bostik 6y ago
Your choice of counterexamples highlights an important aspect. Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Android as a strategic advantage across a global market, Kubernetes as a plumbing layer enabling more businesses operate logically like Google. Sure, it's a CNCF product since 2016 or so, but it still enjoys Google's backing. Postgres? They have a very specific governance model - a single company can not employ over 50% of the core contributors, to guarantee that the direction of the product is not taken over even by accident.
- wmf 6y ago
  Governance won't help if you have no contributors at all because there's no revenue coming in.
- lacker 6y ago
  Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Is that really "outlier" behavior? More and more important open source projects are prominently backed by a single large tech company. React, TensorFlow, TypeScript, Go, etc. If you just look at the last decade, there has been more important work done as "single-sponsor open source" than under the GPL.
  - cardanome 6y ago
    A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare. Those projects have ultimately the interests of the corporations in mind not of the users. Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering! Sure many of them happen to be useful and are simply for increasing the prestige of the company but let's not act like it is a good thing.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      If we want to bark up this tree, a larger problem is FAANG inventing technologies that assume you have equivalent baseline competency and maturity. Which leads to companies that do not (eg no CICD or data architecture standard) adopting tools that assume they do (k8s & tensorflow). (And yes, I realize this is because most folks who work at the former aspire to jump ship to the latter) Say what you want about Microsoft, but they do a much better job of meeting the customer where they are (dumpster fire) instead of where Microsoft is.
swyx 6y ago
> using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license license noob here - can you elaborate on why exactly it is so much better?
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  AGPL is a license qualifying the criteria of OSI's OpenSource definition and FSF's Free Software definition. A key point there is that a user can use the software quite freely without restrictions only with the caveat that modifications have to be made available to users. (AGPL is slighqtly more complex) Many of the "modern" licenses allow to look at code, but prevent distribution and/or modification and/or usage. They typically aim for any "proper" usage requiring a commercial license and not giving the guarantee that code can be fixed in case the original vendor stops working on it.
  - bosswipe 6y ago
    I don't value OSI's stamp of approval since they were explicitly founded to coopt FSF's effort and make it more corporate friendly. Obviously corporate lawyers would disagree with me. A license that allows all typical freedoms except "use the software to start a SaaS using proprietary infrastructure" is fine by me.
    - ufo 6y ago
      While there are significant ideological disagreements between the OSI and FSF, when it comes to FOSS licenses their definitions are mostly equivalent. There are very few licenses that are recognized by the OSI but not by the FSF, and vice-versa.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      Proprietary infrastructure = All infrastructure essentially. So you're fine with a license that can't be used for SaaS. So basically you're happy for the commercial internet to be powered by proprietary software - with all that would mean for free software.
api 6y ago
Problem: the letters "G, P, L" are toxic to a huge number of companies. This has nothing to do with the controversy around Stallman. It's because Microsoft spent over a billion dollars in the 1990s mis-educating the market that GPL software is "viral" and if present can "infect" non-GPL software with the GPL license. The problem would go away if you renamed the license to something else. It's that stupid. A lot of the flavor of the week licenses exist for this reason, as well as to address some of the weak corner cases of the AGPL.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  The GPL is neither long nor complex. If a company won’t use GPL software because of Microsoft’s efforts, but would use that software under an identical license called something else, I think that company will experience many other difficulties on their journey as well. For shrink-wrap software, GPL can be an issue. For hosted software, it’s generally not (which is why all the desire to make other licenses, including AGPL).
- slabity 6y ago
  > A lot of the flavor of the week licenses exist for this reason, as well as to address some of the weak corner cases of the AGPL. I'm interested in what the 'weak corner cases' of AGPL are considering it was pretty much made to correct some weaknesses in the GPL.
  - api 6y ago
    It doesn't adequately handle the SaaSification case, which is when someone hosts the software behind a paywall. It only handles the "Tivoization" case when someone ships the software inside a closed source box.
    - slabity 6y ago
      Isn't the purpose of GPLv3 to handle Tivoization and AGPL was made to handle server-side sort of use-cases? If I use AGPL-licensed software in a SaaS type of environment, I still need to release the source-code even if I'm not distributing the software directly, correct?
api 6y ago
Anything not hard-copyleft (GPL, AGPL) or source-available (BSL etc.) is going to be embraced, extended, and SaaSified / paywalled. Eventually the open version might get abandoned since its authors will get tired of providing free labor to billion dollar cloud companies. I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components.
- indigochill 6y ago
  > I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components. And that seems fine, at least if you subscribe to the Unix philosophy of composability. Honestly, I love Django, but for some projects I'd love even more to use just Django's ORM without all the other stuff (which I also like, but is irrelevant for some projects).
- dcow 6y ago
  If you use a GPL library then your main work becomes GPL.
  - tarsinge 6y ago
    We are talking about products here.
  - rover0 6y ago
    If you use a GPL library and don't make the main work GPL you're committing copyright infingement. Your work will never magically become GPL.
  - da_chicken 6y ago
    That's true -- well, you're obligated to release the work under GPL -- but quite a lot of libraries are LGPL licensed which allows a proprietary application to link to it.
- valyala 6y ago
  IMHO, companies change their product licenses from BSD-like licenses to custom source-available licenses because of the fear they couldn't compete on the market. The license change doesn't protect the company from losing the market. Moreover, it increases the speed of company abandonment because of bad public message. Full disclosure: I'm CTO at VictoriaMetrics [1], we are happy with Apache 2 license and have no plans to change it. [1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/ https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/
soenkeliebau 6y ago
>Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license. I'm not sure I agree. Yes, standardization is a good thing and AGPL is the "known evil", but having read it I do think that it is a very very complex piece of text - personally I'd go so far as to say that it is close to incomprehensible and would prefer pretty much anything else. But even aside from that the sheer number of companies that point blank ban AGPL licensed software from being used in their stack could be used as an indicator as well. Though this may be due to the common misunderstanding that it is a viral license, which just goes back to my prior point on it not being clearly worded. I won't even mention alternatives, I'm sure they all have issues, it is a complex topic, but if it were up to me the AGPL would not be my first license choice.
- platz 6y ago
  If companies want to ban AGPL, well that's their perogative. Alternatively, catering to those companies wouldn't bring relevant benefits to the project anyway
  - viraptor 6y ago
    There are corps which have a (close to) blanket ban on AGPL, but still submit patches to open source projects. HP would be one of them. I don't think it's a big loss though.
  - soenkeliebau 6y ago
    Arguably selling support/services to a company using that product would help pay for developers that work on the product, which to me sounds like a benefit. With the AGPL that would require dual licensing, and that draws flak as well. I think the notion that OSS means there cannot be any money involved simply cannot hold true anymore these days. Software has become extremely complex and requires dedicated developers working on it - and they need to eat. We are currently seeing a lot of companies changing their licensing model for a reason - because there is not currently a middle ground between OSS and a working business modell that the OSS crowd doesn't hate. That being said, I'd love to be proven wrong here!
- 6y ago
cryptonector 6y ago
Open source is a business tool. There are many business models where open source can be useful. PG has such a vibrant user _and_ developer community that it pays to be a freelancer in that community and there's room for lots to play. SQLite3 is very much the opposite: it has _no_ developer community outside the core team, but the business model is the SQLite Consortium, which pays for the core team, and the closed-source test suite whose existence prevents hard forks. It makes sense to use attractive-to-end-users licensing at first and later switch to a license that helps lock in support bucks. Call it bait-n-switch if you like, but even the SQLite folks did it, only they didn't do it with the _license_ but with the _test suite_ -- either way they made it really difficult to play in their space and/or fork.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

echelon 6y ago

If they don't, Amazon will gobble them up. This is a good thing. Linux being GPL 2 was great for computing when we had thick clients, but now everything is moving to the cloud. Companies can innovate on top of it and not really give back.

josephcsible 6y ago

This seems to lump relicensing to better FOSS licenses like AGPL in with relicensing to bad non-FOSS licenses like the Commons Clause, SSPL, BSL, Redis Source Available License, and Anti-996 License. You're right about the former, but the latter is screwing over the community.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
Serious question: How is the community impacted by SSPl, BSL, etc? The average end-user who makes no modifications and is not reselling as-a-service is fine, there is no additional burden with either AGPL or the non-OSI-compliant licenses. How does the AGPL screw over the community less than the other licenses? AGPL is problematic for a slew of reasons, lots of corporations (whether or not you agree that for-profit enterprises make up the bulk of the "community" is a separate discussion) disallow it entirely (mostly thanks to Google's precedent).
- gibba999 6y ago
  The community is impacted because there isn't an intellectual commons to build from. The OSI or FSF-approved licenses form an ecosystem. I can have a project which mixes AGPL, GPL, and BSD code. I can make that part of the next version of Ubuntu. I can borrow bits of code. It all works together. If the goal is to have a computer running free software, AGPL builds towards that goal. If the goal is to use the code in new and unexpected ways, AGPL builds there. The non-OSI licenses are walled gardens. Even the ones which nominally allow remixing require me to drop a few grand on a lawyer before remixing them (more grand if it's international). AGPL is toxic to some corporations for mixing into their proprietary projects, but the commercial dual-license takes care of that. Most corporations don't mind spending money. AGPL also gives a long-term sustainable pathway if the original vendor goes under or goes evil.
- shawnz 6y ago
  Blocking competition among providers of your app as a service is a burden for users. Users would benefit from being allowed to use the provider which best meets their needs, rather than being forced to use the provider who happens to be allied with the copyright owner. AGPL tries to ensure that third-party providers are at least sharing their development efforts to the same extent that those efforts were shared with them. AGPL doesn't try to give anyone an unfair advantage at providing the software as a service, not even the copyright owner.

judofyr 6y ago

> All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. […] It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. Ahem: Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-series-b-for-open-source-developer-platform/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-... I completely support the right to chose your own license and how you want to sell and use your own code, but let's be honest here. This is done because investors have discovered that it's possible to earn money on services around Open Source products, and Grafana Labs has gone all-in on this approach. Now they need the relicensing in order for the business model to remain viable. We're lucky that the code remains AGPL, but notice that they are still not committed to ensuring that all the code will remain AGPL (i.e. they still want CLA so they can relicense later).

staticassertion 6y ago
> Now they need the relicensing in order for the business model to remain viable. This is exactly what the parent is saying though. They're going through this process to ensure that their business remains viable and they can continue to build and support the project.
- judofyr 6y ago
  I still think this sentence here is not quite precise enough: > All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. To me this sounds like the relicensing is done so that a few programmers finally can get paid for their hard labor while maintaining critical software we're all using. What's actually happening here is that some creators have convinced a few investors that they'll be able to give a huge return on invest by building up a sales department around the product. And now the realize that they're not able to accomplishing that with their original license. It's a perfectly acceptable business strategy, but it's not necessarily the only way of running an open source project. I'm still hoping that we (the open source community) can find even better ways of ensuring high-quality software remain open source without being so dependent on current mindset of investors.

throwaway823882 6y ago

> If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die Good riddance. Incumbents owned by corporations have too much control and prevent replacement projects from arising. When a community builds a solution, how it works is dictated by its users and developers, not profits.

29athrowaway 6y ago

And each one of them will be forked by the major companies that were supposed to pay.