Big tech companies (the money behind the Open Source Initiative) have done a few things.
1. They co-opted the free software movement and made it more business friendly.
2. They convinced people that Open Source is pure and software that isn’t Open Source is unclean.
3. They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.
4. They convinced a well meaning subset of those developers to police the other devs and pressure them to release their software under big tech approved licenses.
Liquibase is also not free software. Most of these non-open-source licenses aren't free software. I'm not aware of any exceptions, but I'd be happy to see some examples if there are any.
The rest of your comment mainly seems to be a mixed bag of rhetoric. It obscures the reality that Liquibase is, to modify your words, "co-opting the" open source movement to make it "more business friendly."
I don’t love their license. But I think that a license that says you aren’t free to redistribute this software or it’s derivatives for a fee (including by letting users use it over a network) if you’re a corporation making over $1 billion a year in revenue is perfectly compatible with the original intent of free software.
The freedoms were about freedom for the user not a non user developer.
If you're talking about free-as-in-freedom software, promoted by Richard Stallman and the FSF, then they have always been clear that Free software must not forbid commercial usage or require payment. Vendors are perfectly free to sell copies of Free software if they wish, but the license cannot forbid making copies and derivatives, even for commercial usage. See:
The principles predate modern SaaS by decades. You can see it in the wording of the FAQ you linked. It keeps using the word "distribute" - meaning giving people a copy of the software to put on their own computer - as if that were the only way of commercializing software. Which it pretty much was in the 1980s.
There has been some revision over time, but there's an argument to be made that small revisions are inadequate to keep up with the sea change in how computing works that's happened since the turn of the century. The elephant in the room here is that SaaS, and especially cloud computing, has pretty well undermined the practical foundation for how the Free Software model was supposed to work for people who are trying to make a living selling Free Software.
Doesn't the AGPL from nearly 20 years ago address SaaS? Given that basically every big tech company bans AGPL licensed software, it seems like it provides adequate protection.
Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
>In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".
>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:
```
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license.
It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort
will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state
of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a
user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them
himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for
him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or
company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make
changes.
```
In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.
Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.
The world changes, everything changes. Already 20 years ago Stallman saw that his original idea was abused (tivoization etc.), hence GPLv3. In the web era we have a completely different set of issues to deal with, and one of them is the killing of incentive by the big three public cloud providers.
Back in RMS days, he advocated, for example, a RedHat-style business model where you sell Free Software with services. But when AWS takes your project and releases it as their service, good luck competing with them. This is a very real problem.
I didn’t think the idea of creating free software was to monetize it. If you create a software as “free”, then anyone including hyper scalers can use it.
Put out a restricted license if you don’t want hyperscalers to offer it as a service. Although they have enough software engineering talent to use the old version to create and maintain a fork (e.g. valkey, opensearch, etc.).
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
Those comments came later. Also making copies and selling them along with the source code is much different than the SaaS model that RMS didn’t predict.
If you think that the explicit reminder that free software allows selling is inconsistent with the original definition, then I think the onus is on you to prove that inconsistency. So far I read your comments as giving a sort of argument from silence that commercial transactions weren't explicitly mentioned in the earliest versions together with a gut feeling that your view is the same as theirs.
The original 1986 definition, which I see you referring to elsewhere, came from a news letter that's available here: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
The news letter itself cost $1. And it also includes an order form charging $150 for Emacs ($443.40 in 2025 dollars). The tape and the manual come to $487.74 in 2025 dollars.
The issue with SaaS is loss of the freedoms, not that vendors charge money. Free Software was never about forcing organizations to break even or operate at a loss. If you believe that's inherent to the original definition then I think you'd have to present a clearer argument for that position.
Free Software Foundation Order Form
February 6, 1986
All software and publications are distributed with a permission to
copy and redistribute.
Quantity Price Item
________ $150 GNU Emacs source code, on a 1600bpi industry standard
mag tape in tar format. The tape also contains
MIT Scheme (a dialect of Lisp), hack (a rogue-like game)
and bison (a compatible replacement for yacc).
________ $15 GNU Emacs manual. This includes a reference card.
Thus, a tape and one manual come to $165.
________ $60 Box of six GNU Emacs manuals, shipped book rate.
________ $1 GNU Emacs reference card. Or:
________ $6 One dozen GNU Emacs reference cards.
Shipping outside North America is normally by surface mail. For air
mail delivery, please add $15 per tape or manual, $1 for an individual
reference card, or 50 cents per card in quantity twelve or more.
Prices are subject to change without notice. Massachusetts residents
please add 5% sales tax to all prices.
Thanks for clarifying. But I think that's the same thing in the context of the FSF's thinking. I believe you are arguing that missing freedom 0 implied a sort of compatibility with the non-commercial restriction (this is the argument from silence I referred to earlier). But from what I see, the incompatibility of non-commercial restrictions is forced by the logic. Freedom 0 was almost surely an attempt to clarify confusions and make explicit an implicit assumption.
There are really two issues here: one is what counts as copyleft (i.e. the ideal FSF license) and what counts as compatible with copyleft. The so-called permissive licenses like MIT and BSD are compatible with copyleft licenses in a way that licenses that restrict commercial access aren't. That's because these licenses don't add new restrictions but the non-commercial one does.
The abstract idea of copyleft is that it's a chain of rights grants A > B > C > D... where entities on the right have exactly the same rights as the entities on the left. In other words, copyleft preserves downstream freedoms, or ">" is a freedom preserving operator for copyleft software.
A permissive licensed piece of software X can be incorporated into copyleft software, say, B because X does not restrict any freedom required to be free software. However once incorporated, the chain becomes absorbed, you can't un-free the free software. So X >' B where >' is a sort of injection operation, but then everything downstream of B uses the ">" operator. X can also spin off proprietary copies of itself. Those are not compatible with free software, but they exist on a different branch of the rights grant tree and so aren't relevant to free software.
On the other hand a license with a non-commercial clause includes a restriction already. It's not a hypothetical restriction that someone else can add to a fork (as in permissive licenses). You can't take a license with a non-commercial clause M and map it into free software because, as you granted, free software includes the right to sell and the license doesn't grant the right to remove the non-commercial restriction. If it did grant the right to remove that restriction, then a fork that removed the restriction would possibly be compatible with free software.
What your argument amounts to in this framing is that even though A has the right to sell copies of the software, ">" doesn't have to preserve that right. This would require a stronger argument IMO, since (1) the freedom to charge is explicitly mentioned early even if it's not explicitly enumerated as one of the four freedoms yet, and (2) we have no examples where the FSF allows an entity on the left of ">" to terminate rights on the right of ">". That would break ">" as an operator.
The developer and the user are one and the same. Freedom for one is freedom for the other. Users should have the freedom to pay someone else to act as developer for them, as well.
These tenets are core to Free Software. Without freedom for users _and_ developers, there is no true freedom.
> Most of these non-open-source licenses aren't free software
Free as in beer? They are. BSL and SSPL and FSL and friends are free, with some restrictions which are usually extremely reasonable and boil down to forbidding reselling.
In context of GNU and FSF, when we say free software, we always mean free software with the basic freedoms
Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
If you do price segmentation and prohibit billion (trillion?) dollar companies such as Amazon.com from using it, it is no longer free software
Sure, but that zero-dollar copy comes with no guarantees from the person passing it around. You could, as a billion dollar company, provide the software freely but offer additional warranties and support for a licensing cost. This was and is a really common business model for companies that package Free Software for pay.
If you’re going to throw the commandments of software freedom at someone to make your point you do not get to exclude exactly the part that explicitly contradicts what you say with a dismissive “except that, that doesn’t count” because it doesn’t fit your ideas.
A license that gives freedom but not gratuity fits the rules you quoted. The general topic is far from an open and shut case so I’m happy to debate arguments with you, but not the lazy, disingenuous way.
I am talking about the 4 rules posted by GP above [0] from FSF’s definition of free software, after selectively removing the part that wasn’t aligned with their point, then calling that part “moot”. I was not talking about the content of the article. The comment thread starting at the link below will provide all the context.
I would not call all of them "extremely reasonable" - "forbidding reselling" also significantly discourages forking. If the original company is bought by Oracle/Broadcom, and raises the prices to unreasonable amount, all their users are likely screwed.
As a user, it's pretty important for me that someone can continue to provide software under reasonable conditions even if original authors can't.
(FSL and other licenses which convert to open source are much better in that regard, but there is no excuse for BSL / SSPL)
“They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.”
They adopted the existing Debian Free Software Guidelines as the Open Source Definition. The DFSG are good, actually, and represent an important community consensus outside the FSF.
They looked around and found the guidelines that most closely matched their goals. Specifically DFSG already included a clause about not restricting commercial use.
Also if you read the original DFSG the clause about field of endeavor has been interpreted by OSI differently from the intent.
It was about saying your license can’t prevent an end user of your software from using it for a specific purpose. It really says nothing about restrictions on how you can sell the software.
The problem is OSI is now the sole interpreter of the definition.
> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.
Why is that the problem? Trademarks are one of the three branches of intellectual property. The two words "open" and "source" look like generic terms, but "Open Source" has come to mean a relatively specific thing. So have Disney and Google and Coca-cola.
The DFSG and the OSD are the same text, but the OSI and the Debian project interpret it differently, and this difference is important.
Debian (and most other distributions, btw), for the most part (or entirely, I suppose), agrees with the FSF / the GNU project when deciding which license is free or non free. The OSI has a more permissive interpretation.
RMS speaks about that in a recent interview in French [1], English translation below:
> La FSF a financé Debian à son commencement. Mais rapidement, le projet, qui comptait plus de contributeurs, a voulu formuler une définition de la liberté différente, avec l’intention d’être équivalente.
> À l’époque, j’ai commis une erreur : j’aurais dû vérifier plus attentivement s’il pouvait y avoir des divergences d’interprétation entre le projet GNU et Debian. La définition me paraissait équivalente, même si elle était formulée autrement. J’ai dit : “C’est bon.” Mais en réalité, il y avait des problèmes potentiels.
> Plus tard, quand l’open source a émergé, ils ont repris la définition de Debian, je ne sais plus s'il ont changé quelques mots mais ils ont surtout changé l’interprétation. Dès lors, elle n’était plus équivalente à celle du logiciel libre. Il existe aujourd’hui des programmes considérés comme “open source” mais pas comme logiciels libres, et inversement.
> J’ai d’ailleurs expliqué ces différences dans mon essai Open Source Misses the Point.
English translation (not a native English speaker, I hope the translation is ok, especially considering that RMS is close to his words and it's probably easy to misrepresent him without noticing):
> The FSF funded Debian at its beginnings. But rapidly, the project, gaining more contributors, wanted a different phrasing for the definition of freedom, which the intent of being equivalent.
> Back then, I made a mistake: I should have checked more carefully if there could be different ways to interpret it between the GNU and the Debian projects. The definition seemed equivalent to me, even if it was phrased differently. I said: "OK". But in reality, there were potential issues.
> Later, when Open Source surfaced, they took Debian's definition, I don't know if they changed a few words but they above all changed the interpretation. Since then, it was not equivalent to the free software definition anymore. There exist open source software that's not free software, and conversely.
> By the way, I explain all this in my Open Source Misses the Point essay.
Yep, the Sybase Open Watcom Public License. The OSI considers this license open source [1], the FSF and major distros don't [2], including Fedora [3] and Debian [4].
It is notably used by the Open Watcom C compiler, which is used to compile VirtualBox's BIOS. Which is the reason why you won't find VirtualBox in most distros, including Debian.
The reason the FSF and major distros don't consider it free is that there are cases where you can't use it privately without releasing your modifications. The license doesn't pass Debian's Desert Island test [5]:
> Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.
I don't have an example of a license that the FSF / GNU project considers free and that the OSI doesn't consider open source.
> Oops... it looks like OSI smoked something especially bad this time, I'm afraid. This license looks like someone took his time to collect every single problematic clause.
Yeah but MIT is a million times better than elastic 2.0 or other trash commercial "source available" licenses, I wish everything was GPL and all photos were creative commons but they're not and I'm not going to begrudge any business releasing a tool under MIT.
That's not my point. I mostly agree with that. But I'd go a step further and say in the real world Open Source software doesn't offer enough protections against big tech companies doing big tech company things with your software.
The license here isn't an exemplar of what I'm interested in. But the discussions on this thread are. Anything that isn't OSI blessed is bullied.
We are already OK with saying you can use this software however you want, but when you distribute it you have certain obligations/restrictions. I think it's fine to go a step further and say if you distribute this software and you make $1 billion a year in revenue, you can't charge for it.
I think that's fine the same way I think it's fine to say a company has free speech despite not allowing people to threaten murder.
Neither the free software definition nor the open source definition see someone else using your software as something that you need protection from. This kind of thinking is contrary to the entire idea of open culture.
Someone using your software (for whatever purpose) does not negatively affect you unless you depend on holding a monopoly over some aspect of your software - in which case you have already decided that your priorities lie elsewhere than free software - e.g. you want to build a business.
I mean I wanted to release a project under a modified license like "if your corporation laid off engineers in 2022-2025 you may never use this project commercially" language, but I think MIT might still be best. Software is trickier than licenses for things like images where licenses like creative commons BY-SA are really good because it guarantees the photo stays in the public domain but you can also include the photo on your website (considered a collection and you can still retain rights to your blog post).
The problem with software licenses is that software is so much more composable. Like sure you can host a restrictively licensed project and call into it from your company's commercial app, but if you want to modify a module into your app that's tricky legally. Maybe I'm missing something here but I think the real risk is fake open licenses like elastic v2 (some YC company launched with it today) rather than the push for licenses like MIT.
So you have qualms about OSI co-opting free software movement
Then defend a source available license designed by a company that describes the license as intended for prioritizing business needs over user freedom and used, and is often brought out when businesses decide to switch a more available license to one that restricts commercial activity, co-opting public contributions that would otherwise never happened
INSTEAD of promoting copyleft licenses such as AGPL, seems a bit odd. We care about freedom, in every use case.
I don’t think calling it “source available” is being honest. It looks like you’re free to modify and distribute it all you want so long as you aren’t pulling an Amazon.
AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.
> AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.
What does it matter if they do? The point of the AGPL is that if you make a version available to users over the network, either you release the source to your version or you can't use it. That subsidiary could still be made to release the source or stop using it. Wouldn't that be "mission accomplished?"
Not exactly. If you're not modifying your version you don't need to make the source available to server users. So if you contract out the modifications, and they only give the source to you, and you give the source to nobody...
I don't know if that scheme would work but I think "not battle tested enough" is valid.
Also there's some weirdness in how the availability requirement applies at the time of editing that gives me questions, but I'm far from an expert there.
I think a plain read of the license would make it clear that the "distribution" obligation occurs when you make it available on the network to your users (regardless of whether you modified it yourself or paid a contractor to do so), but I'm not a lawyer, so sometimes what looks like plain text to me can have a specific meaning that doesn't make sense to me.
Well the wording is "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer[...]"
Starting with no trickery, there's a lot of circumstances where you could buy software from a vendor and confidently declare you didn't modify it. And that should be true even if you ask for certain features just for you. So there's probably a way to make the separation work.
I think that the contractor would be required to change the software to include a notice, and if you removed it you would be modifying the software again. I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.
My view is that if Amazon or Apple lawyers thought they could bypass the AGPL that easily, they would've done it already (just look at the stuff NVIDIA does to pretend that it's not flagrantly violating the GPL).
You can't change the code to remove the notice, but you could let the link expire. Or the frontend server, while adding your own branding, might remove the notice the backend added.
> I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.
I completely agree there, but they still need to find the license clause sufficiently correct and in scope if they want to throw the book at you.
Why do you need it to be battle tested when you already know that that is allowed?
You're also forgetting that even if it was illegal, setting up a shell company in a foreign country means the shell company will be able to get away with a lot of outright illegal stuff.
Chinese tech companies can just take your code with no recourse.
The open source initiative was initially about hiding the political and philosophical aspects behind the free software movement (that's the second part of your (1)). (hence the "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software" essay [1]). With some benefit of the doubt, one could imagine that it was a well-meaning move to make companies do free software so we could all enjoy the freedom it gives, without them feeling they are doing dirty politics. This hasn't worked out: programs targeting end users are still proprietary for the most part.
I'm not sure what's bad about 2. What's quite bad however IMHO is the push to use permissive licenses and the anti (A)GPL FUD that these big tech companies spread. Of course it is very convenient to them that every library under the sun is under MIT or BSD, so they can built proprietary software more efficiently.
Note: the OSI recognizes the AGPL as an open source license so at least the set of "big tech approved licenses" is not the same set as the OSI approved licenses.
Many “big” companies would rather not bother with GPL, but the biggest tech companies don’t care when it comes to repackaging and reselling it as a service.
AGPL hasn’t been thoroughly tested in the courts, so it’s unclear how much protection it offers. It’s not beyond someone like Amazon to setup a new company just firewall off AGPL software.
Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. Basically, a ""contagious"" or copyleft license as GPLv3 intended, but even more viral than intended in the AGPL variant since it extends well beyond the source software. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with how Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, *because they're otherwise the same as GPLv3 and have already been tested.*
I think this poster created the legal theory themselves because they were aware of other legal concerns with the AGPL affecting the above scenario. I've read a lot of legalblogging about AGPL, and none bring up this as even a remote possibility, because unless you think GPLv3 case law is somehow irrelevant then you don't think AGPL will be simply bypassed.
One last thing: I'm surprised the poster was concerned about AGPL being untested, despite it using GPLv3, and not that FSL has only existed for 2 years and has 0 case law surrounding.
> legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available
If I understand correctly what you say, this is one of the main concerns with the SSPL because of the following [1]:
> The SSPL is based on the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), with a modified Section 13 that requires that those making SSPL-licensed software available to third-parties (modified or not) as part of a "service" must release the source code for the entirety of the service, including without limitation all "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available", under the SSPL.
I'm not familiar with this concern for the AGPL itself.
Yes, that's the MongoDB variant which codifies it directly, and SF Conservancy and other legal entities promotion FOSS licenses states that the network stack contagion concern does not actually apply for the AGPL. But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition.
So far this contagion concern hasn't actually played out, and big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros - and nothing thus far has been compelled to be open sourced that isn't AGPL software.
> But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition.
Oh yeah, I have encountered this argument before, indeed. Thanks for the pointers btw. I do agree with Drew (your last link) here. I think it's part of the FUD from Google & Co I mentioned in my first comment in this thread. To me, it's even an evidence that the AGPL actually works as intended: it's not convenient for the Big Tech companies who can't reuse the AGPL without having to release their code that's targeted to end users, which they don't want to do.
> big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros
Do you have specific software in mind? What's AGPL in a common Linux distro? I'm asking because this surprises me. AGPL isn't usually used for something that's not a internet service, I wouldn't expect to find it in Linux distros' basic blocks.
Is Amazon Linux a common Linux distro? If so, it's often distributed with AGPL licensed code, I can think of a few pieces of software it has that are AGPL. They haven't been able to do internal forks of Ghostscript, if they were ever to do so, because of AGPL.
Debian is also the other more common one distros with AGPL software included with it.
Other things like forks of BerkleyDB by hyperscalers have all ended up as FOSS because of AGPL. Presumably this is a better example of where non-AGPL code would have not actually seen the light of day.
These distros package AGPL software, but are these AGPL packages part of the base install (I don't think so), and does Amazon use this software on production?
Okay, I believe you, I'm not familiar with this. I'd still be interested in knowing which specific AGPL software Amazon would use themselves (note, I'm sure they distribute AGPL software through their distro, that doesn't mean they use it themselves).
> For Debian, the software are in the main archive, actually.
I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.
So for Amazon, I used to work there and not sure I can talk about specifics, but there was AGPL software used outside of the AMIs but they were approved on a case by case basis. Ghostscript is public and used in the AMIs that are shipped standard, and ofc is used sometimes by Amazon. And if any modifications went out, it was of course gladly republished, but I don't think any forks of AGPL software were being maintained to the best of my knowledge.
>I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.
No, afaik, unfortunately. That might drastically change how you distribute its base. I was a little unclear but I had meant "No but at least the most common distro ships it in their archive" with my first comment.
AGPL isn't viral or contagious, it's copyleft. You need permission from the author to copy. If you violate the license terms you're copying something you're not allowed to copy. That's a copyright violation like illegally downloading music and the rights holder is allowed to tell you to stop doing it.
Oh I agree! And I think it's straightforward to comply with.
I was just explaining the common legal concerns that pop up with the license, and that too much 'contagion' has historically been a gripe about its lack of case law.
Sorry, I'll put that in air quotes, I don't believe free software is disease causing :) just speaking about the common concern is whether or not AGPL copyleft applies to everything involved in responding to a network request (it does not).
FSL is a much simpler court case. “You weren’t allowed to compete with us. You did. Here are the actual damages incurred. Pay us.”
An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.
The potentially overreaching nature of AGPL is one reason it maybe unenforceable. On the other hand if courts lean towards the less viral interpretation Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.
>An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.
In US courts, the case law shows that the "virality" is not really an open question because of GPLv3 case law, and has never been interpreted that way. I'm not sure why you're commenting about this scenario when you're unaware that this has been actually tried in courts.
In fact, we saw that in infamous Neo4j AGPL case, actually. AGPL worked as intended and protected the AGPL software in a similar way to LGPL. The court went on to protect non-GPL compliant additions that Neo4j made as being considered contagious, even, going even further to protect the original licensee than intended with the original unmodified license.
So, just recapping, you've gone from stating that Amazon could firewall off AGPL because it has no case law, and after learning it does has its case law includes GPLv3 that it simply may not be 'viral' enough because that hasn't been tested in court, to now learning it has been tested in court and successfully enforced.
>The extent of virality added by the additional clauses is not clear.
The Neo4J case was one piece of a longstanding part of GPLv3 caselaw where the virality is clear.
>My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.
Just a recap of your responses so far:
So AGPL has no case law and might even be unenforceable, so therefore it you should use non-free source available licenses. Oh, it does have case law and hyperscalers have been forced to open source their forks like of BDB?
Well, the virality hasn't been tested and FSL would be an easier case. Oh, it has been tested, multiple times and licensees have had to work out an agreement like in the Neo4j case - such that judges would actually be able to rely on prior art unlike FSL?
Okay, well, even if that's all true - Amazon could just firewall it anyways. How? Well they would simply use vast resources to create proprietary hardware, create a fork for proprietary hardware despite that making it impossible to receive patches from the main fork, and then sell that as a service.
Based on the above, I think you've done what you can to convince me.
> Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.
Well I guess they could today, I don't see the AGPL preventing them to. As long as the modified source is available under the AGPL I suppose they'd be good to go.
A license that forces someone to release software for specific hardware would be non-free I suppose.
I don't see this being practical though. Running proprietary hardware just for this reason would likely be costly, and not really efficient: someone could restore support for general hardware from upstream / only keep the interesting changes.
The original open source was a programmer to programmer relationship, not company to company. Open source as a business model was inveted later, and it turns out compatibility with original open source licenses only goes that far.
It’s kind of facile to imagine a conspiracy actively working to “convince” people to do the wrong thing. I’ve never seen any evidence of such a thing.
In reality, I think it’s an emergent property of software development, where very few people can make a living using the platonic ideal of a free license. People start projects that are free, then see that they can’t pay the rent, while users (including companies) keep asking for more support and more feature work (for free, naturally).
So the projects evolve, and get closer to business, both to attract contributions from developers who are paid (by big business) and to position project owners to actually make some money.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, or if we even need to make such a judgment, but I think the phenomenon is easily explained without resorting to some kind of shadow campaign on behalf of business.
There are 2 different "PR" campaigns that happened.
The first is Open Source vs Free Software. There's nothing shadowy about it. It's right there in the open. You can see who finances OSI. You can read what have to say about making Open Source business friendly and branding a new term vs "Free Software".
And you can see how shortly after they started promoting the term it took off in popularity. They didn't invent the term, but they definitely popularized it.
The 2nd PR campaign is OSI convincing devs that only software that only software that uses an official blessed license is pure.
What is the point of this comment? Free Software is the best of course. Open Source can be relicensed into Free Software, or relicensed into anything, as long as you keep the attribution or whatever little consideration they ask. So although Open Source is a corporate tool, at least the current snapshot is still equal to the best.
This is below Open Source. And it's claiming to be Open Source. You've made the case of why Open Source is a lowered standard, but you seem to be doing it to defend an even lower standard.
This is like defending an Open Source product calling itself "Free Software." It doesn't make any sense. People can release under any license they want, they wrote the software. The problem is lying about it.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still remember everyone talking about how Android was so much better because it was "open source". And for a while, that was true. Now it's just a free gateway into having your freedom has a user taken from you, because no one ever bothered to make Android an actual FLOSS community like Linux and many programming languages are.
You need to have an actual ethos behind these things. You need to have an actual foundation organization behind these things like the PSF, FSF, or Linux foundation that drives the development, not corporate overlords who have a profit motive.
The people involved need to understand that they're not going to create untold amounts of value that can be measured monetarily. At best you might get hired as a fellow for a while and get to draw some money from donations. Linus only got rich because some very generous people offered him shares after they built a company on his project.
I think (free / libre) Android is still alive today (although it is endangered now with Google not yet having released Android 16 QPR1. I would still hope with enough contributors we could fork it). Forks like LineageOS/GrapheneOS exist, which further improve allow you to use Android completely without proprietary Google Spyware. There is also a quite big ecosystem of free open source apps (on FDroid and other repos)
The problem isn't that there's no free/libre Android, it's that it's not the core ethos.
15-20 years ago, someone at Google thought, "Jeeze, these little smartphones are great, but they could be better, and imagine all of the data we could get off of users if they did everything in their lives with one?", so they bought into Android, which was a completely independent startup until 2005. That is the platform's raison d'être. They wanted to compete with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and later iPhoneOS, for the data that people were entering into smartphones, so they introduced a software product that was open source so that OEMs would buy in. And it worked.
Android would not have had a use to Google as a GNU/Linux-style project where there is no gatekeeper. If I can easily tear out Google's proprietary software, and replace it with something else without losing access to things like the Play Store, then Google just lost out on the value proposition on their purchase of Android in 2005 when it came to my use of it. They did it to make money off of my use, not to graciously support a FLOSS project.
And now we're seeing that playing out as all of the FLOSS projects you mention are under direct threat from Google's handling of the project.
You seem to imply it is a negative, I don't think it is.
1. They certainly came from the free software movement, but they don't call it "free software", they call it "open source". It is a detail but the name acknowledge the distinction, "open source" is a more practical term while "free software" is more idealistic. And I think it is a good thing we have both a business friendly OSI for getting stuff done and a more militant FSF to keep businesses in check.
2. I never needed this convincing so I may be biased, but open source is I believe superior to proprietary. Think of the source code as documentation, the best kind because it tells the truth. Think of the ability to change and rebuild the software as unlimited extra settings you get for free.
3. Their definition of open source is as much canon as the definition of free software by the FSF is canon.
4. Most developers aren't lawyers, we can't really trust them to pick licenses, or worse, write licences that will do what they think will do. So having an approved list of well tested license is a good thing.
That big tech and big money is behind it is not a bad thing. Developers want to get paid after all. Big tech have the best lawyers too, so by picking a licence they acknowledge, you know what you are up to.
And note that some of the OSI approved licenses, like AGPL are particularly hated by big tech.
I'm going to vote you up, because at least your points make sense.
The key problem with your argument unfortunately is this part.
>> they don't call it "free software", they call it "open source"
The problem with this is that "Open Source" is already a phrase with meaning. Trying to co-opt that term for marketing reasons is disingenuous.
I happen to think that a source-available license is better than a closed source license. I ship my own code that way. However what I create is not Open Source, and I don't market it as such.
Liquibase is using a known term to market their product, when their license is not compatible with that term.
Their license is absolutely fine. Trying to pass ot off as OSS is not.
"While corporations were once opposed to this model of software licensing, fearing the reduction of the Exchange-Value of their own products as a side effect of its widespread adoption, they ultimately realized that this software licensing model represented another socialized model of production which could be privately appropriated."
This was the original 1986 definition of “free software”.
‘The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.’
Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
I don't know, they were focused on freedom for users not for vendors/programmers.
I think it's very intentional that a restriction on what you can do with software -- including reselling it -- is a violation of the "four freedoms" -- freedoms for what someone can do with software, including redistribute it or use it for any purpose they want (including reselling it).
These licenses meant to prohibit users from using the software in ways that harm the business interests of the programmers -- I am confident the original creators of free software four freedoms would agree they are not free software. It is very intentional that they were saying the freedom of users to do what they want with software should not be limited for the convenience of the business interests of those who wrote the software.
The 4 freedoms came later. The above definition predates them. There’s nothing in that definition that makes me think anyone was thinking of anything beyond community created software,
distributed by the community.
This license isn’t about users. If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.
This license in particular isn’t my favorite, but I’m totally fine in theory with licenses that attempt
to patch loopholes exploited by bad actors.
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
That was written in a world where “selling software” meant charging people money for Software that ran in their computers, like the famous example of Stallman mailing tapes with Emacs tarballs.
The whole thing was thought up when residential internet couldn’t be used for much more than email, BBS and Usenet, and it wasn’t viable to use it for downloading a text editor.
It’s not a timeless set of principles to live by forever after, proprietary software —that’s not charged for- dominates everyone’s lives more than ever in the public and private sphere, precisely from companies that benefited from the open source ecosystem of software engineering tools.
The 1985 GNU Manifesto explicitly brings up the possibility of third-party companies whose sole business is charging for setting up, running, and managing free software:
> Meanwhile, the users who know nothing about computers need handholding: doing things for them which they could easily do themselves but don't know how.
> Such services could be provided by companies that sell just handholding and repair service. If it is true that users would rather spend money and get a product with service, they will also be willing to buy the service having got the product free. The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one. Meanwhile, those of us who don't need the service should be able to use the program without paying for the service.
That's not quite true. They didn't imagine that 3rd parties would be "running" the software. In the scenarios above the end user is running the software on their computers. They always have access to the source code and there's no vendor lock-in.
"The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one."
> If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.
In the Free Software community, this line was always blurry, almost non-existent even.
Even if the receiver of the Free Software package is not a programmer by any definition, at worst case, they can ask for a friend to patch something up, and if another friend wanted his patched version, the modified source code has to move with the software package.
Open Source software can block even this simple pathway by not giving back the modified source from friend to the user, creating a dependency. It'd be heartless to do this between two friends, but companies will happily do that.
My most vivid example of this is SDKs for hardware. Half of the API is open, but the patched version of the (open source) libraries cost $2K+, several NDAs and allegiance to company for the rest of your life or you can be sent to a concentration camp operated by an alliance of companies doing the same thing.
...and this is just for a small biometric scanner you happen to find in a piece of 10 year old discarded tech.
> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. Freedom 0 applies to everyone.
Giving a gift does not confer an obligation, and "contributing back" is meaningless in this context. Someone using a gift you gave them to run a business does not harm you in any way whatsoever.
If it was merely about “giving a gift” with no obligations or restrictions there should be no open source licenses. Everything would just be released into the public domain.
Free software has never been about giving gifts with no obligations.
The conglomerates can also host it on their extensive cloud infra at a price small competitors will never be able to match because they own the cloud infrastructure too.
Somehow the service+infra is the same cost or cheaper then buying the infra alone and trying to deploy the open source version to it.
"First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you" I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose. So, even under this definition it is not free or open source.
The GNU Project and Richard Stallman, who made this statement, would agree that it's not free under even this earliest definition. They in-fact made it even clearer when they defined freedom of "use" as the distinct 0th freedom eventually to make it even clearer that being able to use the software freely is fundamental to their idea of freedom. Again, freedom isn't about price, it's about usage, availability, redistribution and lack of restrictions on this. I cannot freely redistribute FSL licensed code under the original definition of free software.
"Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then."
Yes, the GNU project were acutely aware of this and designed the GPL licenses around such scenarios - they just didn't design it for SaaS businesses, where if you redistribute the built program externally after modifying it but only distributed its responses over a network, you technically weren't obligated to open source that modification. AGPL resolved this issue, and has more case law behind it than this 2 year old license, and has certainly less daunting implications than a not legally well defined 'competing purpose'.
Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with whether or not Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, and the license was made by lawyers to clearly provide protection. Did you create this legal theory yourself? Because I've not seen any writing from a lawyer on the internet that suggests that Amazon could firewall themselves off in a friendly jurisdiction under any reading of the license, and I read a lot of AGPL lawyerblogging.
Sentry, the company who created FSL, even states that this license restricts user freedom explicitly - for the sake of the business interests of the original developer.
So summing up.. Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GNU Project, the OSI, the creators of the FSL, the company now currently using FSL, all agree that this source available license does not meet the definition of "free software". So, whose definition are we using out of thin air?
>I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose.
You’re free to distribute it to your neighbors for free for any purpose. You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one. You just can’t commercialize it as a competing product.
“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.
This isn’t my favorite license, but it provides a lot more freedoms than merely looking at the source code.
With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.
>You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one.
So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?
>“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.
No, the source is available to read and the software is not free based on the historical definitions you're providing, unfortunately. Happy to understand from a different lens, but Stallman specifically meant freedom in the way even FSL writers agreed with.
Also, please refrain to using commonly used terms in the common way as 'disingenuous', it doesn't lead to interesting discussion and is how these threads end up needing to be patrolled by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.
So, this is a personal non-legal theory that does not have a basis in jurisprudence, then? GPLv3 is proven as enforceable, and is what AGPL is based on. No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control". That's just not how copyright or licensing contracts work. You may want to disclaim conjectures like this with IANAL..
My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.
My entire point is how big tech has captured the zeitgeist, so the common use of that term is irrelevant.
>No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control".
You are 100% incorrect. Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
>So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?
The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
>My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.
It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.
That you're ascribing malice to the entire FOSS community seems a bit strange, when they're the ones who created the free software definition in the first place. The source is available but is not free software even in the original definition.
>Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.
So, personal theory, wrt AGPL. Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
>The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.
Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
You're right that a business might offer a fee for free software under this definition, but that's unrelated to it being free to distribute under any clauses.
Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
>It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.
I've been involved in this for decades at this point. Free Software and Open Source folks generally "source available" as a pejorative.
By using a term that implies the lowest level of freedoms possible for software that doesn't restrict access to the source code, you are implying that no freedoms exist beyond reading the source.
>Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.
AGPL significantly changes GPLv3. If you want to understand how that could cause it to be unenforceable read up on severability and its limitations in various jurisdictions. Courts have wide latitude in most jurisdictions to decide how much of a contract or license (in civil law jurisdictions they are always the same thing) to uphold if certain parts are invalidated.
>Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.
Free speech has restrictions in every jurisdiction in the world. Saying in something is "free as in free speech" has no implication that it is absolutely free from all duties, obligations , or restrictions.
If that is a requirement for free software, the GPL isn't a free software license because it does place obligations on distribution.
>Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.
I don't care what a single individual says about what he believes now. I'm more interested in what he said in 1985 and what the people who made up the community believed.
Mostly though I only care about any of the past cruft because Open Source and to a lesser extent Free Software has takes the air out of the room in any discussion about software freedoms.
I'm interested in realistic compromises to make more free software more viable in a world where Amazon, Google, and Facebook exist. I'm not interested in ideals about a very specific meaning of absolutely free software.
>I'm interested in realistic compromises to make more free software more viable in a world where Amazon, Google, and Facebook exist. I'm not interested in ideals about a very specific meaning of absolutely free software.
Okay, I'm confused why you bring free software or the free software definition into this at all then if you're just picking and choosing what parts of the original statement/bulletin you care about and what parts you choose to disregard, on top of disregarding the original movement and organization founded at its inception.
If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
Since, again, from the start there the goal of free software was that no single company was supposed to be the single commercializer of a piece of software. That principles carries to the GPL.
If you're hoping to convince us that source available software is actually free software, you're giving me a great platform to talk to others about the history of actually free software and making yourself appear wrongheaded as if you didn't read the original bulletin or understand the larger software development community, or worse that you're attempting to co-opt our very specific yet widely accepted professional definition of free software.
>Okay, I'm confused why you bring free software or the free software definition into this at all then if you're just picking and choosing what parts of the original statement/bulletin you care about and what parts you choose to disregard, on top of disregarding the original movement and organization founded at its inception.
1. It's important for people to understand how OSI co-opted the goodwill and some of the ideas from the Free Software movement.
2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
>If you're hoping to rebrand source available software, why not call it something other than _free software_ if you want to do a rebranding? You could propose similarly internally consistent principles and attempt to cultivate a community. Call it 'fair source' or 'managed availability' or something. Refer to the 'freedoms' as rights, instead. You'd convince a much larger group and wouldn't have to pretend that principles for commercialization wasn't considered in 1985.
I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
I could publish a new project on hacker news and call it "fair source" and then explain how fair source isn't free software, but it's like free software with an extra restriction.
The 5 freedoms:
-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
0-4 same as the rest.
I guarantee you 90% of the comments would be attacks on the license (even if -1 was something reasonable). And it would start off with negative goodwill. Most people haven't actually read the 4 freedoms or the OSD, most people just follow the zeitgeist and it says Open Source == good, everything else == bad.
I do not think that a group financed primarily by big tech should have this kind control on the goodwill doled out by the community. But they do. I think that the more people that understand that the better.
>1. It's important for people to understand how OSI co-opted the goodwill and some of the ideas from the Free Software movement.
Okay I don't understand why this is happening in the same breath you're suggesting that OSI is responsible for making everyone in the free software movement believe freedom of use (even in commercial cases) is required otherwise things are source available. GNU foundation, OSI, and even source available license writers basically agree on this part. Can you be specific here?
Because otherwise you're just reinforcing the perception I explained above, since largely the disagreement between OSI and the original free software people is that OSI supports too _permissive_ and too many non-copyleft licenses, not that the permissive or copyleft licenses need to enshrine certain license holders or disenfranchise others, or block commercialization or competitors. That's deeply antithetical to the idea of free or open software, regardless of the camp.
>2. I think they have some good ideas even if I don't agree with all of them.
AGPL, despite achieving all of your goals to prevent hyperscalers from free riding, is not one of them?
>I'm just a guy with 3 kids under 5 and not enough time to run any kind of rebranding project. I'm just angry that whenever someone launches a project that is more free than proprietary software but that isn't OSI approved, 90% of the comments are about why it isn't free or isn't open source.
Because the community has largely agreed on the principles codified by OSI. The principles you propose seem to betray the larger movement's intentions significantly, which is much bigger in scope than OSI.
>-1: You can't distribute this software if your name ends in "ezos".
>0-4 same as the rest.
That's a lot different than source available licenses actually, which usually declares enshrines the original license holder, even though it's not technically free under the other principles. I think if you thought up of a new consistent principle that didn't enshrine a single distributor or disenfranchise entire classes of other distributors, people would be open to the idea of a variant of free software.
But I think the bigger issue is that you think AGPL is failing somehow in not being restrictive enough compared to source available licenses. Maybe you could articulate that more clearly, and _that_ would gather more mind share. Merely stating that OSI is bad doesn't really change people's opinion of source available. Mostly reinforcing free software/copyleft maxi's ideas and insinuating GPL needs to be more common.
> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.
this is absolutely right, and the OSI has been successfully captured by these companies
would RedHat be able survive to IPO these days? I very much doubt it (see: Oracle Linux)
a new term is needed, "Open Source" is no longer fit for purpose in a world where the hyperscalers exist
Exactly right. These updated licenses are mostly to stop massively profitable hyperscalers using their work for free. For the average joe, or regular company it makes no difference.
There are actually open source copyleft licenses (such as GPL, AGPL) that force "massive profitable hyperscalers" to contribute their improvements back.
Spot on. Thank you for saying this. It boggles my mind with a bunch of former Red Hat types now work for companies like Microsoft and perpetuate a zealot mindset that might have made sense in the 90s but now it's completely divorced from what the next generation of software companies need.
All you have to do is look at the name of the company on the building ...it still says Microsoft folks
You might not have noticed but Microsoft has moving heavily into the open source world. Mind you, they're still a for profit company and you and I might not like everything they do to make their profit but they're a long way away from hating on open source.
"Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world." [1]
Microsoft has subverted projects like CPython by hiring mediocre core developers who have built out their power over the years. Microsoft has coerced other projects to move to GitHub so they could steal and launder the copyright in their LLMs. Multiple Microsoft GitHub CEOs have mocked open source and resistance to the code laundering.
Microsoft "open" source projects like VSCode exist to lock in developers, surveil developers and steal their IP. Developers should become dependent on GitHub, Copilot and stolen code until the open source ecosystem can finally be destroyed.
The entire thing is a big EEE that is beginning to pay off because of LLMs (we can still resist by moving off GitHub and rejecting LLM code theft).
1. They co-opted the free software movement and made it more business friendly.
2. They convinced people that Open Source is pure and software that isn’t Open Source is unclean.
3. They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.
4. They convinced a well meaning subset of those developers to police the other devs and pressure them to release their software under big tech approved licenses.