4 ms·

I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would preve

I feel like one of us is fundamentally misunderstanding this license. My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs*, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. Had this license not been used there would be nothing preventing me from forking the software. My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it". Which is fair enough and has its benefits, but it's not open source as much as it is a promise to become open source if the licencor ever loses interest. All those examples you cited weren't using this licence, and probably would have had a much harder job creating their forks if this license was used. Xapian specifically highlights a flaw in your logic. The creators of Xapian wouldn't have used this license because they don't want to re-licence their software. The only people that would use this license are ones who were already willing to re-license their software. The existence of this license doesn't actually solve the problem because you can't force people to use this license any more than you could force them to use an open license. *edit: it's worth pointing out that this really does basically kill any chance of a fork. Normally you could start a fork with a single dev and then grow it naturally, but with this license you need a team the size of the official team to put in two years of work, and to keep doing that in perpetuity.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
> My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. The answer is a bit of yes, and a bit of no. If the project is actively maintained then that company that does so, has the first mover advantage. If that company slows down / does something dodgy, you can fork it that very moment. You can't commercially compete for two years which is correct, but it opens up that opportunity. > Had this license not been used there would be nothing preventing me from forking the software. Except potentially an even worse license or an open core model where the best bits are not public at all. I do not believe this to be a better model. You're right that in the hypothetical situation a project could be open source without any restrictions and the original developers can reap the benefits without any free-riders coming along. But our experience has shown that just appealing to the good in people doesn't work. > All those examples you cited weren't using this licence, and probably would have had a much harder job creating their forks if this license was used. I would argue that that is not the case. Xapian under a hypothetical FSL would long have been able to commercialize it. MariaDB had more options for commercialization than they do today because of the GPL limitations. That said, I'm not working there so I cannot say how much the GPL was a hindrance.
- mcny 3y ago
  What are your thoughts on AGPL? Is it not good enough? Do you think (lets say it out loud because we all know what we are talking about) Amazon Web Services will have advantage over you if you picked AGPL as your license? At the end of the day, I think your sales team has to earn its salary. It can't just phone it in like (I assume) Microsoft sales does with Microsoft SQL Server. Why isn't AGPL good enough? Genuinely asking, what change does it need to make it better? Edit: previously on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768668
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    > What are your thoughts on AGPL? Is it not good enough? I'm generally not a fan of GPL based licensed because it means that you create a massive dis-balance between the original copyright holder (who can dual license for commercialization) and everybody else. It might be fine for Sentry or another SaaS business, but then you cannot even take pieces of code and use it in another project that cannot be GPL licensed because for instance it needs to go the app store etc. GPL (and AGPL in particular) is considered such a tainted environment that many steer away from it entirely. AGPL also is from the v3 family of GPL licenses which have outright bans in many commercial environments. But GPL in general is a too complex topic to address in a HN comment for me.
    - pabs3 3y ago
      What about GPL projects without a CLA that have multiple copyright holders, so that none of them can dual license?
    - mcny 3y ago
      > I'm generally not a fan of GPL based licensed because it means that you create a massive dis-balance between the original copyright holder (who can dual license for commercialization) and everybody else. It might be fine for Sentry or another SaaS business, but then you cannot even take pieces of code and use it in another project that cannot be GPL licensed because for instance it needs to go the app store etc. > GPL (and AGPL in particular) is considered such a tainted environment that many steer away from it entirely. AGPL also is from the v3 family of GPL licenses which have outright bans in many commercial environments. But GPL in general is a too complex topic to address in a HN comment for me. This is very helpful, thank you. I have no insider information about elastic or sentry. Everything I know about the whole thing is from comments such as from HN. What I am hearing from you is that you don't see big cloud providers such as AWS as a threat but rather as an insurance policy so as users you can feel relatively safe in picking a SaaS product knowing that in the future (two years from now?) if the vendor were to go tits up, you can still have someone else who will step in and fill the void. I thought your intention was to make it as difficult as possible for another SaaS provider to compete against you but... clearly not? I appreciate the thoughtfulness of all of this and the pain of SaaS customers because just having the source code isn't enough. Often times, I am simply not qualified to run something like sentry myself and it is a matter of either spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on a SaaS or spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on another dedicated employee. That being said, what I am reading from your comment is that the problem with GPL at least from the perspective of the user is all about perception and not about substance. From what I understand as a hobbyist, I can essentially disregard licenses altogether. I am not distributing anything. You could license flask as Oracle Evil License (not actual name of the license, just making it up) and it wouldn't matter as a hobbyist because all I am doing is learning about flask. What I mean is AGPLv3 should be fine for companies who are not SaaS providers and those who are SaaS providers, should contribute back. What makes you not a fan of GPL?
atq2119 3y ago
If you follow the link to the actual license, it does list done explicitly permitted uses. So yes, it does seem that you can fork it and do something useful with the fork. That something useful is restricted, which is the point of the license. I think the intention here is reasonable and honest as presented by the big list. Whether the actual legal language matches that intention - who knows. I'm worried that it might not but IANAL.
bentlegen 3y ago
> My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it". I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors. The license does not prevent you from the former. You could fork it and do what you want with it to monitor your own non-competing software. And if your goal is the latter – to fork the project to compete with the original authors – why do you feel you should be allowed to do that? Sentry is developed by employees on its payroll, not from community contributions (with a caveat that there are many parts that are fully permissive OSS, licensed under Apache 2 or MIT, and those projects do have some community contributions). And yes, the license is meant to discourage this competing use – for 2 years.
- James_K 3y ago
  No license can prevent you from making alterations to your private copy of a piece of software.
  - joshuaissac 3y ago
    > No license can prevent you from making alterations to your private copy of a piece of software. The right to make alterations to someone else's intellectual property does not exist except as granted by licence or fair use exceptions.
    - James_K 3y ago
      Copyright is about copying. For instance, if I buy a book, I cannot distribute copies of that book. But I can write whatever I want in the book, change any of the text in it, provided I don't then copy the modified text. They own the copyright to the intellectual property, not the physical item you are given or the bits in your computer's RAM, which you are free to do as you please with.
- growse 3y ago
  > I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors. The problem is that whilst the license attempts to define what "competes" means, it's not a good definition. Specifically: Competing Uses specifically include using the Software: 1. as a substitute for any of our products or services; 2. in a way that exposes the APIs of the Software; and 3. in a product or service that offers the same or substantially similar functionality to the Software. (1) & (3) are highly subjective, and (2) attempts to assert a copyright claim over APIs (definitely doesn't work across most jurisdictions). No-one is going to seriously use this software with such a badly written and vague license. (I suspect this is on purpose, and the actual motivation of the license author is to try and discourage anyone else from using / forking the software, whilst at the same time getting marketing cred for pretending to be "open". It's a source-available license. Others may come to different conclusions).

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago

> My understanding is that if I wanted to fork a piece of software, this licence would prevent me from doing so for two years. Then after those two years, I would essentially be stuck using an old version of the source and have to play catch-up with the devs, who would be able to use my work for free but I would not be allowed to use theirs. The answer is a bit of yes, and a bit of no. If the project is actively maintained then that company that does so, has the first mover advantage. If that company slows down / does something dodgy, you can fork it that very moment. You can't commercially compete for two years which is correct, but it opens up that opportunity. > Had this license not been used there would be nothing preventing me from forking the software. Except potentially an even worse license or an open core model where the best bits are not public at all. I do not believe this to be a better model. You're right that in the hypothetical situation a project could be open source without any restrictions and the original developers can reap the benefits without any free-riders coming along. But our experience has shown that just appealing to the good in people doesn't work. > All those examples you cited weren't using this licence, and probably would have had a much harder job creating their forks if this license was used. I would argue that that is not the case. Xapian under a hypothetical FSL would long have been able to commercialize it. MariaDB had more options for commercialization than they do today because of the GPL limitations. That said, I'm not working there so I cannot say how much the GPL was a hindrance.

mcny 3y ago
What are your thoughts on AGPL? Is it not good enough? Do you think (lets say it out loud because we all know what we are talking about) Amazon Web Services will have advantage over you if you picked AGPL as your license? At the end of the day, I think your sales team has to earn its salary. It can't just phone it in like (I assume) Microsoft sales does with Microsoft SQL Server. Why isn't AGPL good enough? Genuinely asking, what change does it need to make it better? Edit: previously on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34768668
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > What are your thoughts on AGPL? Is it not good enough? I'm generally not a fan of GPL based licensed because it means that you create a massive dis-balance between the original copyright holder (who can dual license for commercialization) and everybody else. It might be fine for Sentry or another SaaS business, but then you cannot even take pieces of code and use it in another project that cannot be GPL licensed because for instance it needs to go the app store etc. GPL (and AGPL in particular) is considered such a tainted environment that many steer away from it entirely. AGPL also is from the v3 family of GPL licenses which have outright bans in many commercial environments. But GPL in general is a too complex topic to address in a HN comment for me.
  - pabs3 3y ago
    What about GPL projects without a CLA that have multiple copyright holders, so that none of them can dual license?
  - mcny 3y ago
    > I'm generally not a fan of GPL based licensed because it means that you create a massive dis-balance between the original copyright holder (who can dual license for commercialization) and everybody else. It might be fine for Sentry or another SaaS business, but then you cannot even take pieces of code and use it in another project that cannot be GPL licensed because for instance it needs to go the app store etc. > GPL (and AGPL in particular) is considered such a tainted environment that many steer away from it entirely. AGPL also is from the v3 family of GPL licenses which have outright bans in many commercial environments. But GPL in general is a too complex topic to address in a HN comment for me. This is very helpful, thank you. I have no insider information about elastic or sentry. Everything I know about the whole thing is from comments such as from HN. What I am hearing from you is that you don't see big cloud providers such as AWS as a threat but rather as an insurance policy so as users you can feel relatively safe in picking a SaaS product knowing that in the future (two years from now?) if the vendor were to go tits up, you can still have someone else who will step in and fill the void. I thought your intention was to make it as difficult as possible for another SaaS provider to compete against you but... clearly not? I appreciate the thoughtfulness of all of this and the pain of SaaS customers because just having the source code isn't enough. Often times, I am simply not qualified to run something like sentry myself and it is a matter of either spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on a SaaS or spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on another dedicated employee. That being said, what I am reading from your comment is that the problem with GPL at least from the perspective of the user is all about perception and not about substance. From what I understand as a hobbyist, I can essentially disregard licenses altogether. I am not distributing anything. You could license flask as Oracle Evil License (not actual name of the license, just making it up) and it wouldn't matter as a hobbyist because all I am doing is learning about flask. What I mean is AGPLv3 should be fine for companies who are not SaaS providers and those who are SaaS providers, should contribute back. What makes you not a fan of GPL?

atq2119 3y ago

If you follow the link to the actual license, it does list done explicitly permitted uses. So yes, it does seem that you can fork it and do something useful with the fork. That something useful is restricted, which is the point of the license. I think the intention here is reasonable and honest as presented by the big list. Whether the actual legal language matches that intention - who knows. I'm worried that it might not but IANAL.

bentlegen 3y ago

> My interpretation of this license is that it's effectively saying: "you can't do anything with this while we're working on it". I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors. The license does not prevent you from the former. You could fork it and do what you want with it to monitor your own non-competing software. And if your goal is the latter – to fork the project to compete with the original authors – why do you feel you should be allowed to do that? Sentry is developed by employees on its payroll, not from community contributions (with a caveat that there are many parts that are fully permissive OSS, licensed under Apache 2 or MIT, and those projects do have some community contributions). And yes, the license is meant to discourage this competing use – for 2 years.

James_K 3y ago
No license can prevent you from making alterations to your private copy of a piece of software.
- joshuaissac 3y ago
  > No license can prevent you from making alterations to your private copy of a piece of software. The right to make alterations to someone else's intellectual property does not exist except as granted by licence or fair use exceptions.
  - James_K 3y ago
    Copyright is about copying. For instance, if I buy a book, I cannot distribute copies of that book. But I can write whatever I want in the book, change any of the text in it, provided I don't then copy the modified text. They own the copyright to the intellectual property, not the physical item you are given or the bits in your computer's RAM, which you are free to do as you please with.
growse 3y ago
> I disagree. It depends if you're forking it to use it, or if you're forking it to compete commercially against the authors. The problem is that whilst the license attempts to define what "competes" means, it's not a good definition. Specifically: Competing Uses specifically include using the Software: 1. as a substitute for any of our products or services; 2. in a way that exposes the APIs of the Software; and 3. in a product or service that offers the same or substantially similar functionality to the Software. (1) & (3) are highly subjective, and (2) attempts to assert a copyright claim over APIs (definitely doesn't work across most jurisdictions). No-one is going to seriously use this software with such a badly written and vague license. (I suspect this is on purpose, and the actual motivation of the license author is to try and discourage anyone else from using / forking the software, whilst at the same time getting marketing cred for pretending to be "open". It's a source-available license. Others may come to different conclusions).