5 ms·

GPL all the things?

62 points by pabs3 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zx8080 3y ago
Offtopic. Does posting short scattered messages and responding to own posts in a twitter-style chain somehow improve readability or what's the point?
- eamann 3y ago
  Mastodon still has character limits for posts. There are ways to write longer messages but they require custom clients or integrations. So threads like this are still among the easiest of ways to broadcast a larger thought into the fediverse.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    There's also a benefit for things that are meant to start discussions. You can respond to a given fragment without workarounds like a partial "> quote" at the beginning of your message. Some people amplify that by splitting the messages at logical boundaries rather than just when the space runs out.
  - thejohnconway 3y ago
    Slight nitpick, longer posts require a simple server code modification. Most clients handle longer posts just fine (at least I haven't come across one that doesn't), because servers with longer character limits are common in the Fediverse.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  The point is pure psychology: The internet and other advanced "communication" technologies has caused a loneliness in people due to the lack of genuine human interaction, which is partly due to its inherent nature and partly due to the intense commodification of everything on it from large corporations such as Google. The result is that systems are designed more and more to appeal to the need of the person to gain attention. Twitter itself is much more of a platform where people fight to gain attention for themselves because it is the single aspect of human interaction that has been "gamified" in order to keep these platforms running in exchange for ad views. It is a pathological nature of human interaction that has become a sort of mental drug for users. The final result is that people have a knee-jerk response to continue these systems because they have become psychologically addicted to seeing their own little posts as encapsulations of their voices, with all the upvotes and views satisfying a single component in their minds of human interaction -- a component that is meant to be part of a much larger complex of behaviours that constitute real, genuine human interaction, and which no longer exist due to our collective support of a consumerist system that places no value on the essence of humanity.
jez 3y ago
The article the first post in the thread links to was discussed a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40160331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40160331
peppermint_gum 3y ago
This person's entire argument is that the (A)GPL is "viral", and therefore companies have no right to relicense the software they own the copyright for, and they should be sued. He doesn't quote any specific part of the (A)GPL that supports his argument (frankly, I doubt he's ever read it), he just keeps throwing out the buzzword "viral" as if it means anything. He clearly doesn't understand the concept of CLAs and copyright law in general. This is a very bad post, and I'm surprised it made the front page.
- chungy 3y ago
  "Viral" is the word Steve Ballmer used to describe the GPL as a negative thing. It remains that the owner of the copyright can release the software under any terms they deem fit. Including changing their mind about what license to use for future versions. The license is, well, a license for anyone that's not the copyright owner; it's absolutely non-binding on the copyright owner themselves.
  - nxicvyvy 3y ago
    Has this been tested in court? I also don't think "this is a license for anyone not the copyright holder" is accurate. The license specifically prohibits removal of the license you can't "dual license" GPL code. You can license code under GPL, and you can license the same initial code under a second license, but going forward those two pieces of code are forked. You can't then ship GPL modifications to the other license simply because you have the copyright ownership of the modifications, well, in fact you can, but that requires the GPL license to infect the other source code. You being the sole developer in all of this is irrelevant. I think this comes down to the answer of this question: Can you rescind a GPL license? If not, even as the copyright holder, then no, you as the copyright holder don't have rights over the code moving forward. That was part of the purpose and intention behind this license.
    - mrighele 3y ago
      Sorry, but you are wrong. > I also don't think "this is a license for anyone not the copyright holder" is accurate. The license specifically prohibits removal of the license you can't "dual license" GPL code. The terms in the GPL applies only to the licensee. Unsurprisingly the copyright holder still holds the copyright and is not bound to the term of the license. > Can you rescind a GPL license? Nobody is rescinding the license here. Whoever got the source code under the GPL license will keep having the rights to _that_ source code. What you call rescind, is in fact licensing the existing code _also_ under different terms, _and_ new modifications only under the new terms.
chungy 3y ago
This guy seems to fundamentally misunderstand open source. It was not at all about permissive licenses, but it _was_ about "rebranding" free software to sound less ideologically-driven, while still pretty much meeting the same criteria that free software supports. I think his "war" is actually on MIT/BSD licensing, but it just kind of comes out of nowhere? Who is this guy, what problems has he had or observed?
- nxicvyvy 3y ago
  He's a PHP maintainer posting on mastodon. If code is GPL, all future modifications of that code must also be GPL. It worries me that people in that thread seem to be wildly misunderstanding what the GPL does. The license isn't even that long to read.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    I think you may also be misunderstanding the GPL here, though. If you obtain a copy of a project under the constraints of a GPL license, then, if you distribute that project, or a secondary project built using that project, you must also provide the source (plus modifications) alongside the project. There are some caveats about what "built using" means, and what it means to distribute a project to users, but this premise is broadly true for most forms and variants of GPL-family licenses. The thing that allows relicensing to work is that GPL applies to the distribution of software. Linux isn't, per se, "GPL code", but rather when I download a copy of the Linux kernel, I'm downloading that under the provisions of the GPL license. But the person who wrote the source code does not have to licence the project to themselves. And they can choose to distribute further contributions to the project - or indeed the original contributions - under a new license. Where this gets a bit more complicated is that most open source projects made up of contributions from a variety of people. Each of these contributors owns the copyright - and therefore distribution rights - to their code. For this reason, many organisations require you to sign a CLA to contribute code to a project, which signs over some rights to the project itself (or its core maintainers) and allows them to distribute your code under their choice of license. Alternatively, some projects will ask all contributors to a project for permission to relicense the code, and rewrite code where they couldn't get permission. So the statement you make, that all future modifications of that code must also be GPL, is untrue. It is definitely the norm, because relicensing code is complicated and rarely done, and people who use GPL seem mostly satisfied with continuing to use it indefinitely. But it is perfectly legal for an organisation who owns the copyright to a given project to relicense that project under a completely different license. (Although they cannot revoke the original licence for the code they've already released.)
tsimionescu 3y ago
> If the source code originally used AGPL, isn’t it still contractually obligated to ensure those rights to its users, including any new source code added to it? This guy really has no idea how copyright and licensing work. The AGPL places no obligation on the one distributing the original source code, it only places obligations on those who want to use or re-distirbute the code. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about this. If you don't understand such a fundamental point about licensing, you really really shouldn't be making a fool of yourself speaking about it in public.
- enasterosophes 3y ago
  Yes, exactly. As a free software developer and freelancer, I can release my stuff to the public under GPL, and a company who wants proprietary customizations can still negotiate with me to secure a different license just for them. This post was absolutely cringe. There's a difference between "IANAL" and "I just never even bothered trying to understand."
arein3 3y ago
If adobe accidentally publishes the photoshop source code unde GPL and later realizes the mistake and removes it, can it "retract" previously published GPL code?
- Brananarchy 3y ago
  IANAL and all that... If it's truly accidental (as in a rogue employee or a script that f'd up), they probably have a legal basis to break the contract/license terms and retract it. Just as stores are not required to honor misprinted price tags. There will likely be a court case if someone believes they legitimately received a GPL-licensed version of the code and wants to use that code in another project (or pass it on to others). Like I said, I think Adobe has a good case to win that here. If it's "accidental", and they're just trying to walk it back, there would definitely be a court case. Whether they'd win or lose would be very up in the air, and probably depend on the jurisdiction's friendliness to businesses.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    And if it was completely deliberate but they simply regretted the decision, then they would not be able to revoke the licenses they'd already given out, i.e. that version would be essentially out in the wild and under GPL forever. But future versions could be closed-source again, assuming Adobe retained all the copyright to their code.
- kopecs 3y ago
  I don't believe so (although this is probably fact-specific about what "accidentally" means), at least with regards to retracting the licence. The GPL is an irrevocable licence. They could choose not to continue to distribute the code though (but good luck clawing back the GPL licenced copies).
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Depends exactly on the context of 'accidental'. I suspect such attempts would be based on the idea that it was not authorised properly by the company.
- 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JonChesterfield 3y ago
GPL is dead. Companies like the not-at-all-evil-any-more Microsoft copied it all into a state machine, put some AI branding on it, and now it's available in your text editor with some errors to splice into commercial applications, license free. I don't think there's any point to marking code with GPL at this point. I'd rather people use code as-is than route it through some LLM obfuscation and then use a buggy derivative. Either someone sues Microsoft and wins, which seems numerically infeasible, or we should relicense everything MIT and have done with it.
- redder23 3y ago
  You make no sense, by your logic everyone should unlicense or https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL everything. Basically just give up on any serious license because AI is going to steal it anyway. MIT makes no sense for what you describe.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - JonChesterfield 3y ago
    People have funny ideas about unknown or missing licenses. MIT is widely recognised and understood. It means people who want to follow the license can use your work, as opposed to only people who are happy to ignore the license.
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  I've always said GPL is only as useful as your ability to enforce it in a court.
redder23 3y ago
[dead]
pquki4 3y ago
If this didn't happen in the 90s, it's never going to happen. Just to throw something out there: most of the things in the web ecosystem use MIT license, and we have seen both open source communities and commercial companies benefitting from and contributing to this ecosystem. It is a very vibrant community. Separately, projects like Go, Rust all use permissive licenses compared to GPL licensed gcc. For good reasons. The era of GPL or alike are long gone.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  And yet, whenever an organization exercises the rights that a permissive license gives them there is a big outcry ([1], [2] are just two examples, you can easily find a ton) that they are doing something bad[3]. I say to my developer brothers and sisters, don't throw stones living in a glass house. If you contribute to projects under MIT, that's fine, I did it myself, but don't complain if the license is used in its intended way. If not, well, the GPL is there for you since the 90s... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562 [3] Where "something bad" is usually a wild mix of supposed moral or wrongly assumed legal obligations. EDIT: As chungy correctly pointed out below, my first example does not really support my claim. Thanks, and my bad. I think the point still stands and the second example supports it. Finding more examples is left as an excercise for the reader.
  - chungy 3y ago
    > whenever an organization exercises the rights that a permissive license gives them there is s big outcry ([1], [2] are just two examples Both examples you cited are not related to exercising rights given under a permissive license: instead they are the upstream maintainers deciding to change the terms of future releases. Probably the only major notable example is how Apple used some of FreeBSD's code in Mac OS X, and even that was kind of just a minute insignificant portion of it. If you notice, FreeBSD was neither threatened nor killed by the act.
    - Macha 3y ago
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
GPL Does not help in the Cloud Era MySQL is GPL and this does not prevent Amazon having commercial Modified MySQL called Aurora and does not share it as they do not distribute software. In my opinion you should Open Source something if you're OK with unrestricted use of it... including your competition. If you want to control who is using it and on what conditions, there is already solution for that called proprietary license.
- azemetre 3y ago
  Doesn’t AGPL solve the cloud problem?
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    I'm not saying it doesn't, but a (in my opinion) strong point against this argument is that MongoDB switched away from AGPL to their own license specifically made to solve the cloud problem. Why would they have put in all the effort if the AGPL was working for them? I like to think of it like this: The AGPL is about freedom, and that it hurts the cloud providers is just a side effect, whereas the SSPL and its brethren is specifically made to sting the cloud providers.
    - PeterZaitsev 3y ago
      MongoDB did never care about Open Source (as a movement) - their CEO was always very open - they used Open Source as a freemium strategy (or cheap marketing) so there is no surprise they moved to proprietary license once they achieved substantial market position
      - weinzierl 3y ago
        I think, regardless what their CEO said or not, what counts at the end of the day is what is in the license. The SSPL is literally AGPL + poisonous pill for cloud providers. Characterizing it as proprietary is neither really true nor helpful in my opinion. What I hope we can agree on is that the SSPL (and the other similar licenses) don't focus on the users freedoms and compromise it in a way to reach their objectives. If more people understood this and chose to put their projects under AGPL I'd be more than happy, but I'm also glad licenses like the SSPL exist as an option for people and organizations that want it.
oliwarner 3y ago
> Wasn’t the whole point of the GPL that there could never be a rug-pull? This single statement seems to show a few separate misunderstandings. We'll start with the point of GPL: users having enduring and unalienable rights to run, inspect, change and share the code running on their computer. But you cannot remove somebody's existing right to code under MIT/etc. You make it closed source, I still have yesterday's branch and every right to it I had then. You can change the license for the project (by CLA or getting every contributors permission, or excising contributions) and that's true even in [A]GPL projects. Again, this only affects code going forward. Everyone who had the code, still has all their rights to it. So moving to GPL fixes very little with rug-pulls. It will stop another developer making closed source versions of your code. They don't have to contribute their changes upstream (only to their users). And GPL scares closed-source developers; AGPL terrifies them. They have their purposes but you have to be real with how they're going to be —rightly or wrongly— interpreted. MIT's prevalence is reciprocal convenience. Any project owner can decide to be arseholes and change their licenses but the community just routes around. Valkey is a great recent example of that. Never touching Redis again.
karma_pharmer 3y ago
#GitHub encouraged and exacerbated it. Mostly this.

62 points by pabs3 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Offtopic. Does posting short scattered messages and responding to own posts in a twitter-style chain somehow improve readability or what's the point?

eamann 3y ago
Mastodon still has character limits for posts. There are ways to write longer messages but they require custom clients or integrations. So threads like this are still among the easiest of ways to broadcast a larger thought into the fediverse.
- viraptor 3y ago
  There's also a benefit for things that are meant to start discussions. You can respond to a given fragment without workarounds like a partial "> quote" at the beginning of your message. Some people amplify that by splitting the messages at logical boundaries rather than just when the space runs out.
- thejohnconway 3y ago
  Slight nitpick, longer posts require a simple server code modification. Most clients handle longer posts just fine (at least I haven't come across one that doesn't), because servers with longer character limits are common in the Fediverse.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
The point is pure psychology: The internet and other advanced "communication" technologies has caused a loneliness in people due to the lack of genuine human interaction, which is partly due to its inherent nature and partly due to the intense commodification of everything on it from large corporations such as Google. The result is that systems are designed more and more to appeal to the need of the person to gain attention. Twitter itself is much more of a platform where people fight to gain attention for themselves because it is the single aspect of human interaction that has been "gamified" in order to keep these platforms running in exchange for ad views. It is a pathological nature of human interaction that has become a sort of mental drug for users. The final result is that people have a knee-jerk response to continue these systems because they have become psychologically addicted to seeing their own little posts as encapsulations of their voices, with all the upvotes and views satisfying a single component in their minds of human interaction -- a component that is meant to be part of a much larger complex of behaviours that constitute real, genuine human interaction, and which no longer exist due to our collective support of a consumerist system that places no value on the essence of humanity.

jez 3y ago

The article the first post in the thread links to was discussed a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40160331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40160331

peppermint_gum 3y ago

This person's entire argument is that the (A)GPL is "viral", and therefore companies have no right to relicense the software they own the copyright for, and they should be sued. He doesn't quote any specific part of the (A)GPL that supports his argument (frankly, I doubt he's ever read it), he just keeps throwing out the buzzword "viral" as if it means anything. He clearly doesn't understand the concept of CLAs and copyright law in general. This is a very bad post, and I'm surprised it made the front page.

chungy 3y ago
"Viral" is the word Steve Ballmer used to describe the GPL as a negative thing. It remains that the owner of the copyright can release the software under any terms they deem fit. Including changing their mind about what license to use for future versions. The license is, well, a license for anyone that's not the copyright owner; it's absolutely non-binding on the copyright owner themselves.
- nxicvyvy 3y ago
  Has this been tested in court? I also don't think "this is a license for anyone not the copyright holder" is accurate. The license specifically prohibits removal of the license you can't "dual license" GPL code. You can license code under GPL, and you can license the same initial code under a second license, but going forward those two pieces of code are forked. You can't then ship GPL modifications to the other license simply because you have the copyright ownership of the modifications, well, in fact you can, but that requires the GPL license to infect the other source code. You being the sole developer in all of this is irrelevant. I think this comes down to the answer of this question: Can you rescind a GPL license? If not, even as the copyright holder, then no, you as the copyright holder don't have rights over the code moving forward. That was part of the purpose and intention behind this license.
  - mrighele 3y ago
    Sorry, but you are wrong. > I also don't think "this is a license for anyone not the copyright holder" is accurate. The license specifically prohibits removal of the license you can't "dual license" GPL code. The terms in the GPL applies only to the licensee. Unsurprisingly the copyright holder still holds the copyright and is not bound to the term of the license. > Can you rescind a GPL license? Nobody is rescinding the license here. Whoever got the source code under the GPL license will keep having the rights to _that_ source code. What you call rescind, is in fact licensing the existing code _also_ under different terms, _and_ new modifications only under the new terms.

chungy 3y ago

This guy seems to fundamentally misunderstand open source. It was not at all about permissive licenses, but it _was_ about "rebranding" free software to sound less ideologically-driven, while still pretty much meeting the same criteria that free software supports. I think his "war" is actually on MIT/BSD licensing, but it just kind of comes out of nowhere? Who is this guy, what problems has he had or observed?

nxicvyvy 3y ago
He's a PHP maintainer posting on mastodon. If code is GPL, all future modifications of that code must also be GPL. It worries me that people in that thread seem to be wildly misunderstanding what the GPL does. The license isn't even that long to read.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  I think you may also be misunderstanding the GPL here, though. If you obtain a copy of a project under the constraints of a GPL license, then, if you distribute that project, or a secondary project built using that project, you must also provide the source (plus modifications) alongside the project. There are some caveats about what "built using" means, and what it means to distribute a project to users, but this premise is broadly true for most forms and variants of GPL-family licenses. The thing that allows relicensing to work is that GPL applies to the distribution of software. Linux isn't, per se, "GPL code", but rather when I download a copy of the Linux kernel, I'm downloading that under the provisions of the GPL license. But the person who wrote the source code does not have to licence the project to themselves. And they can choose to distribute further contributions to the project - or indeed the original contributions - under a new license. Where this gets a bit more complicated is that most open source projects made up of contributions from a variety of people. Each of these contributors owns the copyright - and therefore distribution rights - to their code. For this reason, many organisations require you to sign a CLA to contribute code to a project, which signs over some rights to the project itself (or its core maintainers) and allows them to distribute your code under their choice of license. Alternatively, some projects will ask all contributors to a project for permission to relicense the code, and rewrite code where they couldn't get permission. So the statement you make, that all future modifications of that code must also be GPL, is untrue. It is definitely the norm, because relicensing code is complicated and rarely done, and people who use GPL seem mostly satisfied with continuing to use it indefinitely. But it is perfectly legal for an organisation who owns the copyright to a given project to relicense that project under a completely different license. (Although they cannot revoke the original licence for the code they've already released.)

tsimionescu 3y ago

> If the source code originally used AGPL, isn’t it still contractually obligated to ensure those rights to its users, including any new source code added to it? This guy really has no idea how copyright and licensing work. The AGPL places no obligation on the one distributing the original source code, it only places obligations on those who want to use or re-distirbute the code. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about this. If you don't understand such a fundamental point about licensing, you really really shouldn't be making a fool of yourself speaking about it in public.

enasterosophes 3y ago
Yes, exactly. As a free software developer and freelancer, I can release my stuff to the public under GPL, and a company who wants proprietary customizations can still negotiate with me to secure a different license just for them. This post was absolutely cringe. There's a difference between "IANAL" and "I just never even bothered trying to understand."

arein3 3y ago

If adobe accidentally publishes the photoshop source code unde GPL and later realizes the mistake and removes it, can it "retract" previously published GPL code?

Brananarchy 3y ago
IANAL and all that... If it's truly accidental (as in a rogue employee or a script that f'd up), they probably have a legal basis to break the contract/license terms and retract it. Just as stores are not required to honor misprinted price tags. There will likely be a court case if someone believes they legitimately received a GPL-licensed version of the code and wants to use that code in another project (or pass it on to others). Like I said, I think Adobe has a good case to win that here. If it's "accidental", and they're just trying to walk it back, there would definitely be a court case. Whether they'd win or lose would be very up in the air, and probably depend on the jurisdiction's friendliness to businesses.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  And if it was completely deliberate but they simply regretted the decision, then they would not be able to revoke the licenses they'd already given out, i.e. that version would be essentially out in the wild and under GPL forever. But future versions could be closed-source again, assuming Adobe retained all the copyright to their code.
kopecs 3y ago
I don't believe so (although this is probably fact-specific about what "accidentally" means), at least with regards to retracting the licence. The GPL is an irrevocable licence. They could choose not to continue to distribute the code though (but good luck clawing back the GPL licenced copies).
rcxdude 3y ago
Depends exactly on the context of 'accidental'. I suspect such attempts would be based on the idea that it was not authorised properly by the company.
3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

JonChesterfield 3y ago

GPL is dead. Companies like the not-at-all-evil-any-more Microsoft copied it all into a state machine, put some AI branding on it, and now it's available in your text editor with some errors to splice into commercial applications, license free. I don't think there's any point to marking code with GPL at this point. I'd rather people use code as-is than route it through some LLM obfuscation and then use a buggy derivative. Either someone sues Microsoft and wins, which seems numerically infeasible, or we should relicense everything MIT and have done with it.

redder23 3y ago
You make no sense, by your logic everyone should unlicense or https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL everything. Basically just give up on any serious license because AI is going to steal it anyway. MIT makes no sense for what you describe.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  People have funny ideas about unknown or missing licenses. MIT is widely recognised and understood. It means people who want to follow the license can use your work, as opposed to only people who are happy to ignore the license.
ranger_danger 3y ago
I've always said GPL is only as useful as your ability to enforce it in a court.

redder23 3y ago

[dead]

pquki4 3y ago

If this didn't happen in the 90s, it's never going to happen. Just to throw something out there: most of the things in the web ecosystem use MIT license, and we have seen both open source communities and commercial companies benefitting from and contributing to this ecosystem. It is a very vibrant community. Separately, projects like Go, Rust all use permissive licenses compared to GPL licensed gcc. For good reasons. The era of GPL or alike are long gone.

weinzierl 3y ago
And yet, whenever an organization exercises the rights that a permissive license gives them there is a big outcry ([1], [2] are just two examples, you can easily find a ton) that they are doing something bad[3]. I say to my developer brothers and sisters, don't throw stones living in a glass house. If you contribute to projects under MIT, that's fine, I did it myself, but don't complain if the license is used in its intended way. If not, well, the GPL is there for you since the 90s... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562 [3] Where "something bad" is usually a wild mix of supposed moral or wrongly assumed legal obligations. EDIT: As chungy correctly pointed out below, my first example does not really support my claim. Thanks, and my bad. I think the point still stands and the second example supports it. Finding more examples is left as an excercise for the reader.
- chungy 3y ago
  > whenever an organization exercises the rights that a permissive license gives them there is s big outcry ([1], [2] are just two examples Both examples you cited are not related to exercising rights given under a permissive license: instead they are the upstream maintainers deciding to change the terms of future releases. Probably the only major notable example is how Apple used some of FreeBSD's code in Mac OS X, and even that was kind of just a minute insignificant portion of it. If you notice, FreeBSD was neither threatened nor killed by the act.
  - Macha 3y ago

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

GPL Does not help in the Cloud Era MySQL is GPL and this does not prevent Amazon having commercial Modified MySQL called Aurora and does not share it as they do not distribute software. In my opinion you should Open Source something if you're OK with unrestricted use of it... including your competition. If you want to control who is using it and on what conditions, there is already solution for that called proprietary license.

azemetre 3y ago
Doesn’t AGPL solve the cloud problem?
- weinzierl 3y ago
  I'm not saying it doesn't, but a (in my opinion) strong point against this argument is that MongoDB switched away from AGPL to their own license specifically made to solve the cloud problem. Why would they have put in all the effort if the AGPL was working for them? I like to think of it like this: The AGPL is about freedom, and that it hurts the cloud providers is just a side effect, whereas the SSPL and its brethren is specifically made to sting the cloud providers.
  - PeterZaitsev 3y ago
    MongoDB did never care about Open Source (as a movement) - their CEO was always very open - they used Open Source as a freemium strategy (or cheap marketing) so there is no surprise they moved to proprietary license once they achieved substantial market position
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      I think, regardless what their CEO said or not, what counts at the end of the day is what is in the license. The SSPL is literally AGPL + poisonous pill for cloud providers. Characterizing it as proprietary is neither really true nor helpful in my opinion. What I hope we can agree on is that the SSPL (and the other similar licenses) don't focus on the users freedoms and compromise it in a way to reach their objectives. If more people understood this and chose to put their projects under AGPL I'd be more than happy, but I'm also glad licenses like the SSPL exist as an option for people and organizations that want it.

oliwarner 3y ago

> Wasn’t the whole point of the GPL that there could never be a rug-pull? This single statement seems to show a few separate misunderstandings. We'll start with the point of GPL: users having enduring and unalienable rights to run, inspect, change and share the code running on their computer. But you cannot remove somebody's existing right to code under MIT/etc. You make it closed source, I still have yesterday's branch and every right to it I had then. You can change the license for the project (by CLA or getting every contributors permission, or excising contributions) and that's true even in [A]GPL projects. Again, this only affects code going forward. Everyone who had the code, still has all their rights to it. So moving to GPL fixes very little with rug-pulls. It will stop another developer making closed source versions of your code. They don't have to contribute their changes upstream (only to their users). And GPL scares closed-source developers; AGPL terrifies them. They have their purposes but you have to be real with how they're going to be —rightly or wrongly— interpreted. MIT's prevalence is reciprocal convenience. Any project owner can decide to be arseholes and change their licenses but the community just routes around. Valkey is a great recent example of that. Never touching Redis again.

karma_pharmer 3y ago

#GitHub encouraged and exacerbated it. Mostly this.