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Comment by doomrobo | Hacker News Reader

Nice work! Off-topic but remember that you can get a surprising amount of analytics using just your web server logs and no JavaScript at all https://goaccess.io/

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It's becoming more common to not have access to the logs. But I agree if you can access them, they can be a better approach.

Indeed, I've been using goaccess for a while now (https://stats.logpasta.com/) and it suits my basic needs at least seeing what CLI version the few actual visitors I have use.

I haven't had much luck with their "live" report though so I have a Cron job running every few minutes to regenerate it.

Thanks for the goaccess.io suggestion. GoatCounter looked really cool but their crazy decision to go with a GPL-style license for code you run on your website is a pretty serious deal-breaker for me. GoAccess looks much more usable.

Why is it "crazy"?

The reason it uses copyleft is to prevent people from taking my work and operating a competing SaaS with it; I don't think that's very "crazy" IMHO.

It's crazy because the use of the EUPL license forces all your customers to copyleft their website code, which almost no business wants to do, blocking any potential customers from adopting your product. No adoption means no usage, no pull requests, and no revenue. You are free to license your code however you want, but I think you'll find the tremendous effort you put into developing this great project will end up being essentially unused by others simply because of your licensing choice. Monetizing open source projects is incredibly difficult, and simply pasting a GPL or EUPL license text into the project doesn't make them easier to monetize, it makes them harder to monetize.

That is not my interpretation of the EUPL, which defines "Derivative" as software "based upon the Original Work or modifications thereof". I don't think that including this could reasonable be considered as that.

I could add a clause about it to make it unambiguous, perhaps, but it strikes me as rather redundant as it seems fairly clear to me, unless I missed something?

> Monetizing open source projects is incredibly difficult, and simply pasting a GPL or EUPL license text into the project doesn't make them easier to monetize

Sure, I don't disagree with that. But as mentioned non-copyleft includes the risk of a certain kind of abuse that I don't really want to take, either.

You have to do what you feel is best in the face of uncertainty, just as potential adopters of your software have to do what they feel is best in the face of uncertainty about the detailed legal interpretation of how GPL-like language applies to libraries included by or bundled with a website. The interpretation of what is or is not a derivative work in this context is a subject that is legitimately complex enough to be the domain of actual lawyers and actual court cases not of armchair opinion-stating by developers. Even a tiny bit of uncertainty over whether ones entire web operations might end up GPL'd or EUPL'd is more legal risk than 99% of your potential customers will be willing to take on. A paragraph of "explanation" written by a non-lawyer and posted next to the formal license is not going to reassure your customers as to how a court will interpret the formal license component. But again how you chose to license your software is your choice, just as whether to allow EUPL'd or GPL'd software into their website is your customer's choice. The business of software is hard, frequently much harder than the writing of software.

Have you read the copyright license for google analytics? Their license and EULA has not been tested in court either. There is nothing that proves that google can't claim copyright infringement for all sites using their web products.

"You will not (and You will not allow any third party to) (i) copy, modify, adapt, translate or otherwise create derivative works of the Software"

As you typed, The interpretation of what is or is not a derivative work in this context is a subject that is legitimately complex. Its not tested, beyond the fact that the companies of 1/3 of the largest websites has had their lawyers green light to use software with such language in the license. So far the bet that a website does not constitute a derivative work of the analytic software it is using is holding.

Again, it's your call. You'll hear lots of input from customers and potential customers. Some of it you should listen to, others you should not. The one thing that's rarely worth doing is trying to convince an individual customer they're wrong, because even if they have a demonstrable misconception it doesn't scale to try to convince your customers one-by-one that they are wrong. You need to do that at scale, and sometimes that means buying into how they view your product even if it's not how you view it. In the meantime I, like many others, will continue to not integrate GPL code into my website, even if google analytics uses the words derivative product in their EULA.

Some irrationality will always exist and some people can afford to have a phobia against a software license if they work in a industry with little or no competition. It a similar to the trade off in using google analytics, where some companies are can afford to allow google to data mine the traffic in return for analytics, while others either value their user data as being too valuable to give away or have legal obligation that prevents them to send it to a third party outside their jurisdiction and control.

There is a growing trend in EU that giving over traffic data is not really acceptable (or legal) if they represent personal data. Here in Sweden there was a lot of embarrassing leaks where classified information got mishandled and government contracts with IBM broke the law as data left the country. Just a few months later a major medical scandal happened where audio recordings of patients slipped out and the medical confidentiality was broken. The cost is climbing high, and together with GDRP it is really pushing demands that data do not leave the border.

Naturally one can always spend the money to develop a custom system, but then we come back to the problem of competition and budget constrains. It is not easy to get such projects green lighted, especially if some engineer comes up and suggest that they can just use some free software and put that developer time on more important things.

Note that it was someone else who replied to your last comment, not me.

I actually have a local branch that I made after you last comment to change the license of count.js to MIT, but then I thought about it some more and wasn't sure if that was the correct thing to do. My concern is that "EUPL with clarifications/exceptions" would be more complex than "just EUPL".

While "telling customers they're wrong" would not be good, changing stuff at a whim after singular complaint would not be best for the product, either.

Also, providing feedback by calling stuff "crazy" is probably not the best way to get people to listen ;-)

Whatever you decide, you're on the right path in realizing that listening is good even if you think the speaker is crazy

I find it interesting how vehemently folks will argue about hypothetical legal issues with licenses like EUPL, when we have actual real-world examples of companies taking advantage of liberally licensed software projects at the authors' expense.

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