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If they made their tools AGPL, they themselves couldn’t build a cloud offering with additional, closed-source features.
by asymmetric 3y ago
If they made their tools AGPL, they themselves couldn’t build a cloud offering with additional, closed-source features.
- mperham 3y agoA license controls what OTHERS can do with your source. You, the copyright holder, can do anything you want.
- asymmetric 3y agoThanks, I stand corrected. How does this play with third-party contributions? Others might be the copyright-holders of a sub-section of the code.
- JimDabell 3y agoYou ask contributors to sign a copyright assignment before accepting their changes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- duckmysick 3y agoProjects can have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). It gives the owner of the project a right to republish (or copyright) the contributions. You can't contribute to the project without signing it.
- m4rtink 3y agoThis might also prevent a lot of people from contributing due to the added paperwork.
- deno 3y agoOnly if you accept contributions without a license grant CLA.
- _msw_ 3y agoAnd this is why I think people who love Software Freedom should think twice about signing a CLA for their copyleft licensed contributions. [1] inbound=outbound license terms is a good norm for FOSS. Why should a software vendor play by different rules than everyone else when it comes to things like copyleft compliance? [1] https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-license/ https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-l...
- bawolff 3y agoFrom a pragmatic perspective, it is much easier to enforce an open source license with a lawsuit if you own 100% of it.
- _msw_ 3y agoThis is true. The question to me is: does the party to whom you give the rights and authority subscribe to community-oriented FOSS license compliance principles? [1] [1] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
- MattJ100 3y agoThat's not true. As the copyright holder they are not bound by the licence that they release it to others under. The reason AGPL isn't being adopted in these situations is that it doesn't sufficiently protect against someone doing what e.g. AWS repeatedly does - turning open-source projects into services and then dominating the market while continuing to benefit from the upstream project. See the ElasticSearch licence change for a prominent example.