Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I hope OSI and the FSF don’t approve their new “SSPL” license.

AGPL style licenses impose restrictions on usage, thus violating freedom 0 in the Free Software’s definition or Open Source’s rule 6.

AGPL should have never been allowed, precisely because it opens the door for commercial entities to eat their cake and have it too, being the kind of license that can be effectively used to disallow commercial products built on top.

In my opinion your own modifications that are never distributed (by the copyright definition) represents mere usage. And we’re software developers after all, personally I patch most of the libraries I end up using and some patches I may contribute back, but I’m definitely not required by any license.

“Open Source” and “Free Software” have great sex appeal, I get it, but if you can’t deal with competitors benefiting from your work, which is the whole point of such an endeavor, then don’t do FOSS.

Go proprietary and be honest about it.

Completely disagree. How does AGPL interfere with your ability to run a program? I can clone any AGPL software and run it for whatever purposes I want. It also doesn't discriminate against any field of endeavor. I can run AGPL software and charge for it. "Distribution" has changed since 1991 and AGPL extends the viral qualities of GPL to apply to internet services, which is a Good Thing for free software.

> AGPL style licenses impose restrictions on usage

No, not in the commonly understood sense of "usage" as "field of endeavor". I understand what you're getting at but anybody can use AGPL'd software for anything. They just need to publish any modifications they make to said AGPL'd software. It's a restriction, but not on "usage". Such a restriction would be something like "you can't use this in the nuclear industry" or "you can't sell this".

For me usage is the ability to modify it for my purposes.

Writing a script that interacts with said software to enhance or modify its behavior is as easy as clicking an UI button and I don't see a difference.

Also the "understood sense" is irrelevant. Usage is whatever you do with it that's not distribution in the sense defined by the copyright law.

The genius of the GPL licenses has been that they are just copyright licenses handling distribution, but that don't impose any restriction on usage. This was by design. Here's Richard Stallman's own take on "freedom 0": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

> "They just need to publish any modifications they make to said AGPL'd software"

N.B. that's in fact a huge restriction, being a matter of costs too, because "publishing any modifications" costs both time and money.

You can still modify it for my purposes so long all users who interacts with it over a network has access to the modified source code. If the number of users are you then modify away!

> Usage is whatever you do with it that's not distribution in the sense defined by the copyright law.

That is the tricky part. A video streaming site is considered distribution by many copyright laws. There was a time where simply using a website was not considered distribution, but then scope of copyright was extended and concepts like "public performance" and "making available to the public" was applied to works provided through web services.

GPLv3 however gives an additional permission that allow "interaction with a user through a computer network", even if copyright law would forbid it.

That's an interesting take on the matter.

Personally I agree with copyleft licenses for as long as they are just restricting distribution as defined by copyright law. This because IMO there needs to be a clear, lawful boundary for what FOSS licenses can and cannot restrict.

Will look more into it.

Why would we want to force a company like Mango to go proprietary? There is a virtuous cycle at work when companies build business models that enable them to stick around and continue to make significant community contributions as Mango has done. The cloud has enabled bad actors to cut off the air supply of contributors. If you care about open source, you should care about the ability for companies to build business models around it that are benevolent to individual users, but don't let parasites suck the life blood out of contributing organizations.

This new license also gratuitously violates rule 9. Mongo just made a big mistake.

Yeah, I agree it is not an open source license based on rule 9 alone. I mean, the reason for the license not being open source is not an accident. It's not some unforeseen side effect. Their whole purpose of changing the license is to restrict the freedoms of the service companies using the software. I'm somewhat sympathetic to MongoDB for wanting to extract money from them or to force them to work with the open source community. However, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Forcing them that means your license is not open source.

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