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The end goal is to enrich the commons. While the copy-left aspect of many of these licenses are forcing people to obey the golden rule, the intent is clearly to

The end goal is to enrich the commons. While the copy-left aspect of many of these licenses are forcing people to obey the golden rule, the intent is clearly to curtail bad corporate actors to make sure if it is used, it remains in the commons. My concern with non-commercial and non-derivative licensed works is having someone now gate keep access to the work. This has a chilling effect on use as anyone using it now clearly knows the author didn't want their work used for anything outside of "showing to your friends". Did I use the work when talking about it in a blog post? Am I in violation because there's advertising on it? Did I use the work to help make a video that gets a million views? Am I now in violation because I get a small income stream off of some other piece of work that used your non-commercial work on its periphery? You say you want to target hobbyists. Say I'm spending my time investing in learning your library and I want to use it in my job because I think it's cool and I've gained familiarity with it. Now I'm in the position of asking you for permission of whether I can use it or not. My time would have been better spent investing in something that told me from the outset I had permission to use it. You don't want people using your explicit approval, that's your prerogative and NC and ND are for you. If you want people to have control over the tools they learn, use and deploy, then it needs to be under a libre/free license. It's more than aesthetics. Putting a non-commercial license on works, especially software, is a death knell.

kongin 5y ago
>If you want people to have control over the tools they learn, use and deploy, then it needs to be under a libre/free license. I'm old enough to remember having this exact argument on dial up bbs's on why the BSD and MIT licenses were the only true free software licenses and the GPL wasn't. After all the GPL limits my freedom as a developer to not have to share all the source code I write as part of a program. The argument is as wrong then as it is now: the freedom isn't for you, it's for everyone. It doesn't help that that a bunch of squatters came into the commons and stole the words for free software and open source, those words were used long before the FSF and OSI stole them from the rest of us and they didn't mean at all what they were redefined to mean. At least the FSF had the self awareness to realize that they needed a new word and tried for libre.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  I think FSF/OSI did a stellar job of infusing the intent of free/libre back into non-technical societies beyond their reach. Their concepts are clearly laid out and easy to grasp, and we are definitely seeing interesting results now from that infusion. But I also feel like we’re simply rediscovering why societies have laws, which are incompatible with perfect freedom. For example, is the GPL’s restriction sufficiently beneficial that we can overlook its abrogation of personal freedom? I’m not sure that’s widely agreed-upon even today, but clearly it is considered worth it to its author(s), as any good constitution ought to be. We’ve discovered this week why France has a decades-old parasitism law, that allows you to recoup damages when someone else tries to build their fortune using your work and reputation. It serves the same intent as the AGPL attempts to - you can’t resell my work as if it’s yours without paying me - but it is written far more precisely, in a way that does not default-prohibit all commercial uses, but merely those uses that try to feed on someone else’s reputation. A licensing argument would say “then isn’t all commercial use parasitic?”, and the answer in nation-law terms is essentially “a technical analysis of the law might allow for that, but a reasonable analysis would not”. This is the crux where licensing and nation-law diverge: in licensing, to date, we have generally acted as if we must close every possible loophole because there are no judges in our system to evaluate ‘reasonable interpretation’. So, to tie this back to the main point of the post above, if the GPL and AGPL (which appears to be longer than the French parasitism constitutional law!) are trading freedom for benefit, then they are not free, but they’re still trying to be beneficial to society. Have they made the correct tradeoffs in their currency swap of freedom for benefit? Well, I’m not sure. Similar restrictions in nation law would be intolerable to extreme libertarians, who would contest that all nation laws are unacceptable, but the rest of society seems comfortable with a reasonable set of restrictions. Is the AGPL reasonable? This is where the software licensing as legal constitutions model falls down, because we simply are not equipped to judge. We have one or two institutions that offer commentary and blessing, but our laws as written are evidence that we have no judge or jury able to provide reasonable evaluations and judgments. So the AGPL restricts people from building small ISPs just as much as it restricts people from building a multinational ISP. That wasn’t reasonable in a pre-software world, where you had to purchase objects to build things with them, but now that digital work can be reproduced and reused effortlessly, creators of source code no longer get paid for their source code (not that they did very often before!), and so the AGPL tries to fill that void. Is getting paid reasonable? Sometimes I think that we would have been better off tapping into music lyrics copyright and licensing, rather than trying to invent our own field of licensing from base metal principles. Lyrics writers get paid, though of course as with all things megacorps pay them poorly. Cover songs are allowed, but blatant knock-offs are not. Performances require permission, which may entail payment, and certainly does if not granted. Music lyrics aren’t free for all commercial reuse, but they are free for reasonable commercial reuse. So if we try to bridge the gap between existing nation laws, and the ideals of the GPL/AGPL, a simple solution presents itself. One that provides the desired benefit of the AGPL without needing to create new restrictions on freedom. One that has a long and storied history of court judgements to provide human reasonable outcomes when the laws could never be precise enough anyways. Source code is just lyrics to a song played on a computer instrument, and deserves the same protections and freedoms and limited reusability as any other song. (I am not your lawyer, internet forum posts are not legal advice.)
stonemetal12 5y ago
How does that compare to closed source software? Are you allowed to talk about Windows or C# in a blog post? /s This reads as "I don't like it, so how much hand wringing can I do?" If the project doesn't provide a clear road to commercial use like MySQL did or SQLite(Public domain but sells licenses for places that don't recognize public domain) does, then it is hobby only. Don't bother picking it up if you are looking for something that you could use in the day job. Why? Because even if they will sell you a license they aren't setup to support a business.
eloff 5y ago
> It's more than aesthetics. Putting a non-commercial license on works, especially software, is a death knell. I disagree. If you don't do that and Amazon kills your business model as a result, you now have to fire all your developers and abandon the software. Now that's a death knell! I'm happy to use open source licenses for hobby software that I may or may not continue maintaining. For anything I hope to build a business around, I would never consider an OSI license anymore in this new cloud world. Amazon basically killed that open source business model.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> I'm happy to use open source licenses for hobby software that I may or may not continue maintaining. For anything I hope to build a business around, I would never consider an OSI license anymore in this new cloud world. Amazon basically killed that open source business model. There is the AGPL, but that isn't compatible with the majority of Free Software out there.
  - eloff 5y ago
    The AGPL is also insufficient to protect your business from cloud providers (although it does grant more protection than the others.)
phkahler 5y ago
>> Did I use the work when talking about it in a blog post? Am I in violation because there's advertising on it? Did I use the work to help make a video that gets a million views? Am I now in violation because I get a small income stream off of some other piece of work that used your non-commercial work on its periphery? This is where the GPL shines. It doesn't prevent commercial use in the text, it even IIRC explicitly allows it. You don't even have to think too hard to know if you're in violation (did I distribute and did I include source code?). OTOH the requirement to include full source code of derivative works under the same license clearly goes against a lot of commercial use cases. I think the distinction between software and "content" is the utility of software. With content, distribution or viewing/listening is the primary purpose of it. I suppose showing GPLed source code in a video might raise questions of weather the video needs to be GPLed, but that seems like strange edge case (can we brush it off with "fair use"?) even most authors wouldn't care too much about.

kongin 5y ago

>If you want people to have control over the tools they learn, use and deploy, then it needs to be under a libre/free license. I'm old enough to remember having this exact argument on dial up bbs's on why the BSD and MIT licenses were the only true free software licenses and the GPL wasn't. After all the GPL limits my freedom as a developer to not have to share all the source code I write as part of a program. The argument is as wrong then as it is now: the freedom isn't for you, it's for everyone. It doesn't help that that a bunch of squatters came into the commons and stole the words for free software and open source, those words were used long before the FSF and OSI stole them from the rest of us and they didn't mean at all what they were redefined to mean. At least the FSF had the self awareness to realize that they needed a new word and tried for libre.

floatingatoll 5y ago
I think FSF/OSI did a stellar job of infusing the intent of free/libre back into non-technical societies beyond their reach. Their concepts are clearly laid out and easy to grasp, and we are definitely seeing interesting results now from that infusion. But I also feel like we’re simply rediscovering why societies have laws, which are incompatible with perfect freedom. For example, is the GPL’s restriction sufficiently beneficial that we can overlook its abrogation of personal freedom? I’m not sure that’s widely agreed-upon even today, but clearly it is considered worth it to its author(s), as any good constitution ought to be. We’ve discovered this week why France has a decades-old parasitism law, that allows you to recoup damages when someone else tries to build their fortune using your work and reputation. It serves the same intent as the AGPL attempts to - you can’t resell my work as if it’s yours without paying me - but it is written far more precisely, in a way that does not default-prohibit all commercial uses, but merely those uses that try to feed on someone else’s reputation. A licensing argument would say “then isn’t all commercial use parasitic?”, and the answer in nation-law terms is essentially “a technical analysis of the law might allow for that, but a reasonable analysis would not”. This is the crux where licensing and nation-law diverge: in licensing, to date, we have generally acted as if we must close every possible loophole because there are no judges in our system to evaluate ‘reasonable interpretation’. So, to tie this back to the main point of the post above, if the GPL and AGPL (which appears to be longer than the French parasitism constitutional law!) are trading freedom for benefit, then they are not free, but they’re still trying to be beneficial to society. Have they made the correct tradeoffs in their currency swap of freedom for benefit? Well, I’m not sure. Similar restrictions in nation law would be intolerable to extreme libertarians, who would contest that all nation laws are unacceptable, but the rest of society seems comfortable with a reasonable set of restrictions. Is the AGPL reasonable? This is where the software licensing as legal constitutions model falls down, because we simply are not equipped to judge. We have one or two institutions that offer commentary and blessing, but our laws as written are evidence that we have no judge or jury able to provide reasonable evaluations and judgments. So the AGPL restricts people from building small ISPs just as much as it restricts people from building a multinational ISP. That wasn’t reasonable in a pre-software world, where you had to purchase objects to build things with them, but now that digital work can be reproduced and reused effortlessly, creators of source code no longer get paid for their source code (not that they did very often before!), and so the AGPL tries to fill that void. Is getting paid reasonable? Sometimes I think that we would have been better off tapping into music lyrics copyright and licensing, rather than trying to invent our own field of licensing from base metal principles. Lyrics writers get paid, though of course as with all things megacorps pay them poorly. Cover songs are allowed, but blatant knock-offs are not. Performances require permission, which may entail payment, and certainly does if not granted. Music lyrics aren’t free for all commercial reuse, but they are free for reasonable commercial reuse. So if we try to bridge the gap between existing nation laws, and the ideals of the GPL/AGPL, a simple solution presents itself. One that provides the desired benefit of the AGPL without needing to create new restrictions on freedom. One that has a long and storied history of court judgements to provide human reasonable outcomes when the laws could never be precise enough anyways. Source code is just lyrics to a song played on a computer instrument, and deserves the same protections and freedoms and limited reusability as any other song. (I am not your lawyer, internet forum posts are not legal advice.)

stonemetal12 5y ago

How does that compare to closed source software? Are you allowed to talk about Windows or C# in a blog post? /s This reads as "I don't like it, so how much hand wringing can I do?" If the project doesn't provide a clear road to commercial use like MySQL did or SQLite(Public domain but sells licenses for places that don't recognize public domain) does, then it is hobby only. Don't bother picking it up if you are looking for something that you could use in the day job. Why? Because even if they will sell you a license they aren't setup to support a business.

eloff 5y ago

> It's more than aesthetics. Putting a non-commercial license on works, especially software, is a death knell. I disagree. If you don't do that and Amazon kills your business model as a result, you now have to fire all your developers and abandon the software. Now that's a death knell! I'm happy to use open source licenses for hobby software that I may or may not continue maintaining. For anything I hope to build a business around, I would never consider an OSI license anymore in this new cloud world. Amazon basically killed that open source business model.

phkahler 5y ago
>> I'm happy to use open source licenses for hobby software that I may or may not continue maintaining. For anything I hope to build a business around, I would never consider an OSI license anymore in this new cloud world. Amazon basically killed that open source business model. There is the AGPL, but that isn't compatible with the majority of Free Software out there.
- eloff 5y ago
  The AGPL is also insufficient to protect your business from cloud providers (although it does grant more protection than the others.)

phkahler 5y ago

>> Did I use the work when talking about it in a blog post? Am I in violation because there's advertising on it? Did I use the work to help make a video that gets a million views? Am I now in violation because I get a small income stream off of some other piece of work that used your non-commercial work on its periphery? This is where the GPL shines. It doesn't prevent commercial use in the text, it even IIRC explicitly allows it. You don't even have to think too hard to know if you're in violation (did I distribute and did I include source code?). OTOH the requirement to include full source code of derivative works under the same license clearly goes against a lot of commercial use cases. I think the distinction between software and "content" is the utility of software. With content, distribution or viewing/listening is the primary purpose of it. I suppose showing GPLed source code in a video might raise questions of weather the video needs to be GPLed, but that seems like strange edge case (can we brush it off with "fair use"?) even most authors wouldn't care too much about.