> The issue with this “loophole” is that it allows a company to promote itself as free and open source while cutting off SaaS competition. Cry me a river. Star

> The issue with this “loophole” is that it allows a company to promote itself as free and open source while cutting off SaaS competition. Cry me a river. Start with the fact that I only publicly post software that I'm at least notionally willing to support. If you demonstrate competence and ask nicely, I might have other software to offer just to you. ;-) On the software that I publicly post I generally use an Apache license. I use the AGPL on a very specific and unique piece of software where I want to maintain architectural control: show me a use case which can't be pushed right or left and we can talk. In fact, I give away examples for that software in a separate GitHub repository under the Apache license. The principle is simple: if you substantially transform the data separately from my software, you don't need to give your transformational workings away to the data consumer as long as you do it separately from my software. Shift right, shift left; here is effing how. I would be surprised to see my AGPL product exposed to the internet (even with a proxy in front of it). I don't want it modified and exposed to the internet as a cheap hack by self-serving sociopaths who figure they're justified in "by any means necessary" by their high salary, I would view that as dilution and AGPL is preferable to having to contemplate suing for disparagement when the inevitable shitstorm happens: if you're going to expose it to the public, I want to see the software. Expect me to read it and comment on it publicly. So internally you shift left / shift right, and the people working on it have access to my source code: what's the problem? > While the downloadable version is open, the SaaS version is closed off from open source collaboration, innovation, and competition. This is blatant sociopathic projection where the author's own intent, or that of their owners, is transferred to the Other and then disparaged. In any case if they did a SaaS version it would be closed off from such collaboration. The author isn't going to spend their own money and is not the decisionmaker so declaring "negotiate a licensing or support contract, or pound sand" is a waste of time.