4 ms·

Truly one of the biggest wealth transfers in history. From well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations. https://web.archive.org/web/20120

Truly one of the biggest wealth transfers in history. From well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations. https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co... > Why I (A/L)GPL > Open source to open source, corporation to corporation. > If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. > If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business. > I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made. > Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ > To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation. > You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid. > They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run. Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. Nothing else makes sense.

hylaride 1y ago
If AGPLv3 was slapped onto everything back then, the likelihood of linux/open source being where it is today would be an order of magnitude less. A good chunk of the original windows TCP/IP stack was ripped from BSD licensed code. Had that not have been "easy" for Microsoft to take, the internet may not have developed the way it did and we'd all maybe be on proprietary networks like AOL/MSN/etc. The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction. That being said, commercially supported OS software has essentially become shareware - just enough to get you hooked, and then the price jump is enormous.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  That sounds lovely, actually. Before Microsoft added TCP/IP to Windows, there were third party ports of the BSD TCP/IP stack to Windows. The winner ended up being Trumpet Winsock, until Microsoft wisely used the same winsock API for their own implementation and embraced and extinguished. Those ports would still have occurred even if the BSD TCP/IP stack was GPL'd.
  - hylaride 1y ago
    IIRC, Microsoft wrapped a good chunk of the BSD code with it's native implementation of the Winsock API (I may be misremembering and the BSD code may have only been in the NT or win32 code - it's been decades and I'm pretty sure the whole stack has been rewritten since). But if there wasn't a bunch of people pushing various implementations based on a permissive licence, it may not have been clear that the demand was there. Winsock (the API) heavily leveraged BSD sockets in its implementation, too. V1 was for all intents and purposes designed to deal with unifying their BSD implementations that had problematic issues because Windows didn't have a lot of the system calls that UNIX/POSIX did (though POSIX was available later on in NT) and allowing inter compatibility. It's not clear that Peter Tattam would have written Trumpet if the API wasn't already published, which was driven by the BSD code. Also, Trumpet was not free or open source. It was notoriously pirated and illegally distributed. Some history is here: https://windows-pride.fandom.com/wiki/WinSock#Background https://windows-pride.fandom.com/wiki/WinSock#Background
  - account42 1y ago
    The alternative history here would not have been that Wrumpet Winsock didn't get crushed by MS but that MS used another more proprietary technology to do it. They have done it in many other areas, e.g. DirectX vs. OpenGL. You cannot hope to compete against the platform you build your product on.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  > The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction. I'm not convinced. Compromise is the root of all evil. It allows self-contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas to exist. I make a conscious effort to develop my morality by eliminating contradictory ideas and forming self-consistent world views. If the conclusions are extreme, then so be it. I accept the consequences.
mitjam 1y ago
Special booster: New product liability in EU for software. If your software is in any way related to commercial activity (eg. consulting or having been created as part of paid work), yproduct liability kicks in. Best but not 100% secure way to protect yourself is to donate the software to a well meaning non profit. If you control the non-profit, the barrier might not hold, if you don't control it, it's not your software anymore. Update: Thinking of it: AGPL might at least offer some protection as many integrators shy away from using software with this license.
sneak 1y ago
The AGPL is a nonfree license that violates freedom 0. It's a EULA posing as a copyright license. It's nonsensical. https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/ https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/
- kstrauser 1y ago
  I use to feel the same way, but I’ve relented. The end-end-users — the people actually interacting with the software — retain the right to keep accessing its source so they can modify it. That fills an important gap, where vendors can modify other-licensed software, let me use it, but prevent me from accessing the changes they made to it.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  Developers and corporations don't really matter. Trading their freedoms for ours is completely fine. We, the users, are the ones who matter. It's all about us. No, the developer cannot tivoize the software, because that harms us. No, the developer can't isolate it in a server, because that harms us. They should probably be glad Stallman is in charge... My definition of "harms us" is far more expansive and extreme than his. And if the corporations don't like it, why don't they just... buy the developers out like the good capitalists they are? They want the software so badly? Contact the guys who wrote it and and get down to business. Make them millionaires and I'm sure they'll have no issues giving them special permission to violate the AGPLv3. They are the copyright holders, they can do whatever they want. I even emailed Stallman to confirm that he thinks it's an ethical practice, and he does. The emails are literally recorded in the commit messages, just get in contact and talk business. If they won't do that, then let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own full time developers to write their own version. I'm sure their lawyers will also advise them not to even read our free software source code since it can taint the final product. Works for me. If they won't contribute back on our terms, if they won't pay us, then they should get literally nothing. That's leverage. The article you linked is not convincing at all. Who said we're "gifting away" our free software? We're not. We're publishing it so that fellow hackers can enjoy it freely. People who are like us. I for one don't really want corporations taking advantage of this generosity at our expense. Either they become one of us, or they pay for it, or they leave empty handed. People really need to stop feeling sorry for trillion dollar corporations. Won't you think of the poor billionaires with nothing to their names? Give me a break. I care a lot about individual hackers who code for a higher purpose. These are the people I want to help. You'd have to pay me big bucks to spare even one second of thought towards some billionaire technofeudalist organization.
account42 1y ago
I agree to some extend but not in all cases: there can be other motivations that mean it makes sense to use a more liberal license. One example is code that deals with data formats. It's better to have a liberally used license here that can be adopted by corporations without giving anything back if the alternative risks those corporations adopting and popularizing proprietary formats instead.

hylaride 1y ago

If AGPLv3 was slapped onto everything back then, the likelihood of linux/open source being where it is today would be an order of magnitude less. A good chunk of the original windows TCP/IP stack was ripped from BSD licensed code. Had that not have been "easy" for Microsoft to take, the internet may not have developed the way it did and we'd all maybe be on proprietary networks like AOL/MSN/etc. The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction. That being said, commercially supported OS software has essentially become shareware - just enough to get you hooked, and then the price jump is enormous.

bryanlarsen 1y ago
That sounds lovely, actually. Before Microsoft added TCP/IP to Windows, there were third party ports of the BSD TCP/IP stack to Windows. The winner ended up being Trumpet Winsock, until Microsoft wisely used the same winsock API for their own implementation and embraced and extinguished. Those ports would still have occurred even if the BSD TCP/IP stack was GPL'd.
- hylaride 1y ago
  IIRC, Microsoft wrapped a good chunk of the BSD code with it's native implementation of the Winsock API (I may be misremembering and the BSD code may have only been in the NT or win32 code - it's been decades and I'm pretty sure the whole stack has been rewritten since). But if there wasn't a bunch of people pushing various implementations based on a permissive licence, it may not have been clear that the demand was there. Winsock (the API) heavily leveraged BSD sockets in its implementation, too. V1 was for all intents and purposes designed to deal with unifying their BSD implementations that had problematic issues because Windows didn't have a lot of the system calls that UNIX/POSIX did (though POSIX was available later on in NT) and allowing inter compatibility. It's not clear that Peter Tattam would have written Trumpet if the API wasn't already published, which was driven by the BSD code. Also, Trumpet was not free or open source. It was notoriously pirated and illegally distributed. Some history is here: https://windows-pride.fandom.com/wiki/WinSock#Background https://windows-pride.fandom.com/wiki/WinSock#Background
- account42 1y ago
  The alternative history here would not have been that Wrumpet Winsock didn't get crushed by MS but that MS used another more proprietary technology to do it. They have done it in many other areas, e.g. DirectX vs. OpenGL. You cannot hope to compete against the platform you build your product on.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction. I'm not convinced. Compromise is the root of all evil. It allows self-contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas to exist. I make a conscious effort to develop my morality by eliminating contradictory ideas and forming self-consistent world views. If the conclusions are extreme, then so be it. I accept the consequences.

mitjam 1y ago

Special booster: New product liability in EU for software. If your software is in any way related to commercial activity (eg. consulting or having been created as part of paid work), yproduct liability kicks in. Best but not 100% secure way to protect yourself is to donate the software to a well meaning non profit. If you control the non-profit, the barrier might not hold, if you don't control it, it's not your software anymore. Update: Thinking of it: AGPL might at least offer some protection as many integrators shy away from using software with this license.

sneak 1y ago

The AGPL is a nonfree license that violates freedom 0. It's a EULA posing as a copyright license. It's nonsensical. https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/ https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/

kstrauser 1y ago
I use to feel the same way, but I’ve relented. The end-end-users — the people actually interacting with the software — retain the right to keep accessing its source so they can modify it. That fills an important gap, where vendors can modify other-licensed software, let me use it, but prevent me from accessing the changes they made to it.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
Developers and corporations don't really matter. Trading their freedoms for ours is completely fine. We, the users, are the ones who matter. It's all about us. No, the developer cannot tivoize the software, because that harms us. No, the developer can't isolate it in a server, because that harms us. They should probably be glad Stallman is in charge... My definition of "harms us" is far more expansive and extreme than his. And if the corporations don't like it, why don't they just... buy the developers out like the good capitalists they are? They want the software so badly? Contact the guys who wrote it and and get down to business. Make them millionaires and I'm sure they'll have no issues giving them special permission to violate the AGPLv3. They are the copyright holders, they can do whatever they want. I even emailed Stallman to confirm that he thinks it's an ethical practice, and he does. The emails are literally recorded in the commit messages, just get in contact and talk business. If they won't do that, then let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own full time developers to write their own version. I'm sure their lawyers will also advise them not to even read our free software source code since it can taint the final product. Works for me. If they won't contribute back on our terms, if they won't pay us, then they should get literally nothing. That's leverage. The article you linked is not convincing at all. Who said we're "gifting away" our free software? We're not. We're publishing it so that fellow hackers can enjoy it freely. People who are like us. I for one don't really want corporations taking advantage of this generosity at our expense. Either they become one of us, or they pay for it, or they leave empty handed. People really need to stop feeling sorry for trillion dollar corporations. Won't you think of the poor billionaires with nothing to their names? Give me a break. I care a lot about individual hackers who code for a higher purpose. These are the people I want to help. You'd have to pay me big bucks to spare even one second of thought towards some billionaire technofeudalist organization.

account42 1y ago

I agree to some extend but not in all cases: there can be other motivations that mean it makes sense to use a more liberal license. One example is code that deals with data formats. It's better to have a liberally used license here that can be adopted by corporations without giving anything back if the alternative risks those corporations adopting and popularizing proprietary formats instead.