3 ms·

The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source-is-agpl/ https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-sou

The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source-is-agpl/ https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

phillebaba 1y ago
I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  And just to be really clear -- it's not actually a solution to cloud providers not reusing the code for profit (which I assume is the context you're implying, could be wrong here), because AGPL is free software, so people are free to reuse your code for commercial purposes. AGPL at least prevents making private improvements to open source networked code without contributing back. I think in this situation it might have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it's Microsoft. Also, they're well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc. I think another important point might be that "free software" aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.
  - ryao 1y ago
    The AGPL doesn't require them to contribute back. It only requires them to provide the code to end users upon request. No license as far as I know requires people to contribute back. In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send them code dumps containing the hacks people have done to private Linux source trees. They want proper commits that are done well and have been modified to comply with any feedback that they provide. What the project maintainer here wanted were collaborators who would work with him as a team (which is not much different than what most OSS developers what), but no license requires that and it is rare to get that.
    - hardwaresofton 1y ago
      This is a good point, the AGPL and free software in general is really more about users than individual projects and developers. AGPL may not have convinced Microsoft to collaborate.
      - trelane 1y ago
        It is in a roundabout way also about collaboration with upstream, since the users (or those working for them) are fully empowered to be developers if they so choose. And the upstream and buy the product and get the same rights as a user. But first and foremost it's about the users.
    - trelane 1y ago
      The biggest thing that GPL et al. enable is that customers are not locked in to their provider. It's not as much about the collaboration by the vendor per se, though users would likely prefer it, and are themselves able to collaborate on equal footing.
- jezek2 1y ago
  The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me. I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    The anger over cloud hosting came from a specific set of Open Source companies that produced cloud software with the intention of earning money by selling hosting. Mongo, Elastic, and Hashicorp were the big ones. These companies failed to realize that the licenses they chose were incompatible with the business model they chose and then blamed the resellers for their own failure to plan. It was particularly problematic for the FOSS companies because each of these players' plans was to resell the Big Three clouds and live off of the margin, so the instant that the cloud providers decided to just directly compete in the hosting space the original company physically couldn't compete on price. The moral of the story is that if you're releasing cloud software as FOSS you can't plan your business around the idea that you'll be the only hoster.
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    > The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me. I think this isn’t a problem — not everyone has to contribute to any project! People sometimes struggle with the choice between GPL and MIT for similar reasons of popularity. People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff
    - layer8 1y ago
      > People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff This subthread started with the implication that people shouldn't be doing that. But you are right, that's exactly what most are doing.
candiddevmike 1y ago
We need an updated/modernized AGPL that more explicitly delineates what is dependent software. SSPL is probably too far, but it has the right idea.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  What would be the goal of this? I ask because I think the nice thing about the current system is that the goals are well represented/easy to sum up and defendable. What would be the goal of a license between AGPL and SSPL on the spectrum? Seems like such a license would at the very least be non-free? (which is perfectly ok)
  - candiddevmike 1y ago
    Some projects choose AGPL because they incorrectly read that it requires dependencies like calling web services or the underlying configuration management to be open source (such as Minio). SSPL goes beyond this and requires an unsatisfiable amount of dependencies to be open source. There should be a middle ground for folks like Minio and others that want to prevent competitive hosted offerings as that's how they fund the open source version. Whether this would be considered non-free is up for debate IMO. Why would a license like this be considered non-free when the GPL is free? Is it the scope of it? The OSI would hate it because they represent the organizations this is meant to curtail. Though most of this is moot if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it.
    - jen20 1y ago
      > Why would a license like this be considered non-free when the GPL is free? Do you consider the SSPL to be free? If so, this would be. If not, it probably would not be. Why does SSPL require unsatisfiable numbers of dependencies by the way? It seems pretty clear to me (though, clearly, not free). > if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it. If you can actually do this, I look forward to unencumbered Windows-compatible source code having run variously leaked source through copilot.
OutOfHere 1y ago
LGPL is sufficient (without the extra baggage of AGPL).
- lolinder 1y ago
  The extra baggage in AGPL is what makes it work for the purposes that OP wants it. LGPL takes the GPL a step towards MIT, where AGPL takes it the opposite direction.
orthoxerox 1y ago
AGPL without CLA, to be precise. AGPL with CLA is a trap.
- jenadine 1y ago
  What's wrong with CLA? I've contributed to project with CLA. Have been using them and then wanted a feature and the project accepted my patch. Ther are still many people contributing to project with CLA.
  - buzzy_hacker 1y ago
    https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-what-to-do-when-you-encounter-a-cla/226 https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-wh...
    - joshuaissac 1y ago
      For an argument from the other side, here is the GNU project's defence of CLAs: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
      - sundarurfriend 1y ago
        > If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors. > In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment FSF is not the average recipient of copyright assignments - I'd be much more comfortable giving copyright assignment to FSF than to pretty much any other entity: * They're much less likely to rugpull on the contributors and change the licence to something non-free: even pessimistically assuming their leadership got subverted somehow, doing something like this would pretty much be the deathknell to FSF. So there's a known, very high cost to the negative side of CLAs. * They're much more likely than the average project or corporation to actually use the positive benefits of copyright assignment, to pursue legal action and enforce the Free licences the way it empowers them to.
sneak 1y ago
[flagged]
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  It’s classified as free AFAIK, could you expand/lay down some points?
- aryonoco 1y ago
  The FSF considers AGPL Free Software (of course). The OSI considered AGPL, Open Source. Debian considers AGPL to be compatible with Debian Free Software License Guidelines. FreeBSD considers AGPL acceptable in its ports. So when you say AGPL is non free, could you clarify exactly what you mean?
- Xelynega 1y ago
  How is compliance as written impossible?
lonelyprograMer 1y ago
Whenever I see AGPL project, I close the page, and I believe many others would do the same.
- Xelynega 1y ago
  Why?
  - trelane 1y ago
    Because they listen to fear mongering or would prefer to ask nicely that megacorps be kind to their users instead of just using a tool with legal teeth.
  - bobthecowboy 1y ago
    They have to wait for the AI scraper bots to steal it for them :(
  - yahayahya 1y ago
    Probably because the dependency scanner the lawyers at his company required be added to the code review system will instantly fail the review if he added an AGPL project as a dependency. There’s no reason to worry about the AGPL unless you plan to conceal code from its users. Most software businesses take this approach because it’s hard to sell information that is publicly available, and code is just information. Some businesses make money operating software for others. AWS pays on-call engineers to keep RabbitMQ highly available. Free Software protects the user from the developer. Permissive licenses protect the developer from the author. A lot of professional software engineers get confused and think of themselves as the “user” when they’re actually more of a middle man.
dilyevsky 1y ago
I dont see how that would’ve helped with authors complaints in this case
noobermin 1y ago
I have to say every thing mentioning the license or GPL or variants is getting instantly downvoted. Not a good look HN.

The future continues to be AGPL https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source-is-agpl/ https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

phillebaba 1y ago

I agree with this. It seems to be one of the licenses out there that scares the big three cloud providers.

hardwaresofton 1y ago
And just to be really clear -- it's not actually a solution to cloud providers not reusing the code for profit (which I assume is the context you're implying, could be wrong here), because AGPL is free software, so people are free to reuse your code for commercial purposes. AGPL at least prevents making private improvements to open source networked code without contributing back. I think in this situation it might have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it's Microsoft. Also, they're well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc. I think another important point might be that "free software" aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.
- ryao 1y ago
  The AGPL doesn't require them to contribute back. It only requires them to provide the code to end users upon request. No license as far as I know requires people to contribute back. In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send them code dumps containing the hacks people have done to private Linux source trees. They want proper commits that are done well and have been modified to comply with any feedback that they provide. What the project maintainer here wanted were collaborators who would work with him as a team (which is not much different than what most OSS developers what), but no license requires that and it is rare to get that.
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    This is a good point, the AGPL and free software in general is really more about users than individual projects and developers. AGPL may not have convinced Microsoft to collaborate.
    - trelane 1y ago
      It is in a roundabout way also about collaboration with upstream, since the users (or those working for them) are fully empowered to be developers if they so choose. And the upstream and buy the product and get the same rights as a user. But first and foremost it's about the users.
  - trelane 1y ago
    The biggest thing that GPL et al. enable is that customers are not locked in to their provider. It's not as much about the collaboration by the vendor per se, though users would likely prefer it, and are themselves able to collaborate on equal footing.
jezek2 1y ago
The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me. I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.
- lolinder 1y ago
  The anger over cloud hosting came from a specific set of Open Source companies that produced cloud software with the intention of earning money by selling hosting. Mongo, Elastic, and Hashicorp were the big ones. These companies failed to realize that the licenses they chose were incompatible with the business model they chose and then blamed the resellers for their own failure to plan. It was particularly problematic for the FOSS companies because each of these players' plans was to resell the Big Three clouds and live off of the margin, so the instant that the cloud providers decided to just directly compete in the hosting space the original company physically couldn't compete on price. The moral of the story is that if you're releasing cloud software as FOSS you can't plan your business around the idea that you'll be the only hoster.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me. I think this isn’t a problem — not everyone has to contribute to any project! People sometimes struggle with the choice between GPL and MIT for similar reasons of popularity. People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff
  - layer8 1y ago
    > People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff This subthread started with the implication that people shouldn't be doing that. But you are right, that's exactly what most are doing.

candiddevmike 1y ago

We need an updated/modernized AGPL that more explicitly delineates what is dependent software. SSPL is probably too far, but it has the right idea.

hardwaresofton 1y ago
What would be the goal of this? I ask because I think the nice thing about the current system is that the goals are well represented/easy to sum up and defendable. What would be the goal of a license between AGPL and SSPL on the spectrum? Seems like such a license would at the very least be non-free? (which is perfectly ok)
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Some projects choose AGPL because they incorrectly read that it requires dependencies like calling web services or the underlying configuration management to be open source (such as Minio). SSPL goes beyond this and requires an unsatisfiable amount of dependencies to be open source. There should be a middle ground for folks like Minio and others that want to prevent competitive hosted offerings as that's how they fund the open source version. Whether this would be considered non-free is up for debate IMO. Why would a license like this be considered non-free when the GPL is free? Is it the scope of it? The OSI would hate it because they represent the organizations this is meant to curtail. Though most of this is moot if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it.
  - jen20 1y ago
    > Why would a license like this be considered non-free when the GPL is free? Do you consider the SSPL to be free? If so, this would be. If not, it probably would not be. Why does SSPL require unsatisfiable numbers of dependencies by the way? It seems pretty clear to me (though, clearly, not free). > if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it. If you can actually do this, I look forward to unencumbered Windows-compatible source code having run variously leaked source through copilot.

OutOfHere 1y ago

LGPL is sufficient (without the extra baggage of AGPL).

lolinder 1y ago
The extra baggage in AGPL is what makes it work for the purposes that OP wants it. LGPL takes the GPL a step towards MIT, where AGPL takes it the opposite direction.

orthoxerox 1y ago

AGPL without CLA, to be precise. AGPL with CLA is a trap.

jenadine 1y ago
What's wrong with CLA? I've contributed to project with CLA. Have been using them and then wanted a feature and the project accepted my patch. Ther are still many people contributing to project with CLA.
- buzzy_hacker 1y ago
  https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-what-to-do-when-you-encounter-a-cla/226 https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-wh...
  - joshuaissac 1y ago
    For an argument from the other side, here is the GNU project's defence of CLAs: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
    - sundarurfriend 1y ago
      > If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors. > In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment FSF is not the average recipient of copyright assignments - I'd be much more comfortable giving copyright assignment to FSF than to pretty much any other entity: * They're much less likely to rugpull on the contributors and change the licence to something non-free: even pessimistically assuming their leadership got subverted somehow, doing something like this would pretty much be the deathknell to FSF. So there's a known, very high cost to the negative side of CLAs. * They're much more likely than the average project or corporation to actually use the positive benefits of copyright assignment, to pursue legal action and enforce the Free licences the way it empowers them to.

sneak 1y ago

[flagged]

hardwaresofton 1y ago
It’s classified as free AFAIK, could you expand/lay down some points?
aryonoco 1y ago
The FSF considers AGPL Free Software (of course). The OSI considered AGPL, Open Source. Debian considers AGPL to be compatible with Debian Free Software License Guidelines. FreeBSD considers AGPL acceptable in its ports. So when you say AGPL is non free, could you clarify exactly what you mean?
Xelynega 1y ago
How is compliance as written impossible?

lonelyprograMer 1y ago

Whenever I see AGPL project, I close the page, and I believe many others would do the same.

Xelynega 1y ago
Why?
- trelane 1y ago
  Because they listen to fear mongering or would prefer to ask nicely that megacorps be kind to their users instead of just using a tool with legal teeth.
- bobthecowboy 1y ago
  They have to wait for the AI scraper bots to steal it for them :(
- yahayahya 1y ago
  Probably because the dependency scanner the lawyers at his company required be added to the code review system will instantly fail the review if he added an AGPL project as a dependency. There’s no reason to worry about the AGPL unless you plan to conceal code from its users. Most software businesses take this approach because it’s hard to sell information that is publicly available, and code is just information. Some businesses make money operating software for others. AWS pays on-call engineers to keep RabbitMQ highly available. Free Software protects the user from the developer. Permissive licenses protect the developer from the author. A lot of professional software engineers get confused and think of themselves as the “user” when they’re actually more of a middle man.

dilyevsky 1y ago

I dont see how that would’ve helped with authors complaints in this case

noobermin 1y ago

I have to say every thing mentioning the license or GPL or variants is getting instantly downvoted. Not a good look HN.