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Personally I think this is great news. Great news for free software, great news for users, great news for the AGPL. So very few web apps are open source, despit

Personally I think this is great news. Great news for free software, great news for users, great news for the AGPL. So very few web apps are open source, despite so many of the people who develop them claiming to support free/open source software. It seems that the only way to make the web open source is to force the hand of the developers, and that means we need to start pushing copyleft licences like the AGPL. The GPL was created for a different age. So much of the software people use now runs on a different machine; we can't continue to ignore this loophole. BDB has had a commercial licence available for a long time, this move just closes a loophole that people were exploiting to use BDB in non-free software without contributing back. Additionally, to the people saying 'oracle are only doing this to make money', this is one of the ways you are supposed to make money/fund the development of free software. RMS talks about it here: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed. -- RMS

pyre 13y ago
> So very few web apps are open source, > despite so many of the people who > develop them claiming to support > free/open source software. So, if they use GPL'd software, and contribute back to it, but don't release their own software as GPL, then they are just a bunch of 'evil fat cats' that are leeching off of FOSS?
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  Really? Do you have to start playing that game here? Can't you at least try to contribute in a meaningful way before you start acting like this? Let me do the same to you. > 'evil fat cats' He didn't say "evil fat cats", so why do you feel the need to lie and say he did? Only a worthless troll would use those words, and words like "leeching" in place of discussing what he actually said. So really? Is that what you want from HN? Couldn't you have spent a minute and phrased that without being so rude? Regardless, that's not what he said, so your point doesn't make sense.
  - pyre 13y ago
    > Let me do the same to you. <clippy> I see that you seem to be attempting to argue from a Moral High Ground. Would you like me to: 1) Remove your Ad Hominem attack? 2) Remove your rude remarks/tone that conflict with your desire for others to be less rude? </clippy> I'll agree that the 'evil fat cats' remark was probably a bit too far, and I apologize for that. Let me rephrase my comment: I take issue with the view that someone that doesn't commit 100% to an ideology (e.g. Free Software) doesn't care about said movement. The original post was (in so many words) trying to claim that all of the web companies using FOSS software and claiming to 'love Open Source' are being two-faced because none of their own software is release under a GPL license. This Us-vs-Them mentality isn't magically helpful when used in a FOSS context instead of in a, "you're either with us, or with the terrorists," context.
    - anon1385 13y ago
      >The original post was (in so many words) trying to claim that all of the web companies using FOSS software and claiming to 'love Open Source' are being two-faced because none of their own software is release under a GPL license. This isn't about BSD/MIT style licences vs GPL style. The sources to most web apps are not available under any kind of licence. A few toy projects on github that nobody uses don't counterbalance spending all day working on non-free software. I do think a lot of these toy projects are motivated by a sense of guilt. You go in to work and spend all day working against free software, but you can tell yourself you are on the right side and 'contributing' if you share that script that downloads cat pictures. Your criticism is the same one that has been made against the GPL countless times. History has proven it wrong: Linux is a huge success, thanks to the GPL. The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing--that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community." But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join. What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code." Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time. -- RMS
mark_l_watson 13y ago
+1 I agree. I have been dual licensing my little open source projects under GPL/Apache licenses just because I would like wider use, but I don't feel great about doing that. Licensing is a complicated issue and obviously software developers get to choose for themselves. It is difficult to predict the future, but I would bet that in 50 years software development will flip to either an almost all commercial world, or an almost all AGPL (or other open source license) free and open hardware designs, etc. world. Considering economics, it is hard for me to see a path to a mostly AGPL-like world, but it might happen.
pron 13y ago
I, too, like GPL and free software, but I'd like to stress that this change hardly closes any loopholes. The previous BDB license was simply too vague and open to competing interpretations. The AGPL does not require web software using BDB to distribute its source code, only software actually modifying BDB. The gist of AGPL is this: * If you redistribute BDB with your software, then you must provide your software's source code (even if you haven't modified BDB). * If you use BDB on your web server, then you must provide the source for your software only if BDB is modified. Since hardly anyone modifies BDB (I would assume), this affects almost no one. It simply makes the license clear.
- jbellis 13y ago
  Partly true. The FSF interprets "X linking Y" as "X modifying Y and therefore subject to Y's license," which is why Microsoft got to make so much hay out of the GPL's "virality."

pyre 13y ago

> So very few web apps are open source, > despite so many of the people who > develop them claiming to support > free/open source software. So, if they use GPL'd software, and contribute back to it, but don't release their own software as GPL, then they are just a bunch of 'evil fat cats' that are leeching off of FOSS?

jasonlotito 13y ago
Really? Do you have to start playing that game here? Can't you at least try to contribute in a meaningful way before you start acting like this? Let me do the same to you. > 'evil fat cats' He didn't say "evil fat cats", so why do you feel the need to lie and say he did? Only a worthless troll would use those words, and words like "leeching" in place of discussing what he actually said. So really? Is that what you want from HN? Couldn't you have spent a minute and phrased that without being so rude? Regardless, that's not what he said, so your point doesn't make sense.
- pyre 13y ago
  > Let me do the same to you. <clippy> I see that you seem to be attempting to argue from a Moral High Ground. Would you like me to: 1) Remove your Ad Hominem attack? 2) Remove your rude remarks/tone that conflict with your desire for others to be less rude? </clippy> I'll agree that the 'evil fat cats' remark was probably a bit too far, and I apologize for that. Let me rephrase my comment: I take issue with the view that someone that doesn't commit 100% to an ideology (e.g. Free Software) doesn't care about said movement. The original post was (in so many words) trying to claim that all of the web companies using FOSS software and claiming to 'love Open Source' are being two-faced because none of their own software is release under a GPL license. This Us-vs-Them mentality isn't magically helpful when used in a FOSS context instead of in a, "you're either with us, or with the terrorists," context.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    >The original post was (in so many words) trying to claim that all of the web companies using FOSS software and claiming to 'love Open Source' are being two-faced because none of their own software is release under a GPL license. This isn't about BSD/MIT style licences vs GPL style. The sources to most web apps are not available under any kind of licence. A few toy projects on github that nobody uses don't counterbalance spending all day working on non-free software. I do think a lot of these toy projects are motivated by a sense of guilt. You go in to work and spend all day working against free software, but you can tell yourself you are on the right side and 'contributing' if you share that script that downloads cat pictures. Your criticism is the same one that has been made against the GPL countless times. History has proven it wrong: Linux is a huge success, thanks to the GPL. The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing--that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community." But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join. What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code." Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time. -- RMS

mark_l_watson 13y ago

+1 I agree. I have been dual licensing my little open source projects under GPL/Apache licenses just because I would like wider use, but I don't feel great about doing that. Licensing is a complicated issue and obviously software developers get to choose for themselves. It is difficult to predict the future, but I would bet that in 50 years software development will flip to either an almost all commercial world, or an almost all AGPL (or other open source license) free and open hardware designs, etc. world. Considering economics, it is hard for me to see a path to a mostly AGPL-like world, but it might happen.

pron 13y ago

I, too, like GPL and free software, but I'd like to stress that this change hardly closes any loopholes. The previous BDB license was simply too vague and open to competing interpretations. The AGPL does not require web software using BDB to distribute its source code, only software actually modifying BDB. The gist of AGPL is this: * If you redistribute BDB with your software, then you must provide your software's source code (even if you haven't modified BDB). * If you use BDB on your web server, then you must provide the source for your software only if BDB is modified. Since hardly anyone modifies BDB (I would assume), this affects almost no one. It simply makes the license clear.

jbellis 13y ago
Partly true. The FSF interprets "X linking Y" as "X modifying Y and therefore subject to Y's license," which is why Microsoft got to make so much hay out of the GPL's "virality."