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Comment by djaque | Hacker News Reader

I license all of my software AGPL and the reason I do it isn't gatekeeping or some theoretical argument about what software is. It's because I have put a large amount of effort into this product and decided to release it for the benefit of the community. I would feel taken advantage of if a company came in and hoarded that software while making a profit off of it and never giving back. The free market is great and all, but it's also OK to just ask that people give you a fair deal when they use your code.

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> and decided to release it for the benefit of the community

I don't understand. You're saying “for the benefit of the community”, but then only speak about companies as negative examples. (1) Are companies inherently incapable of being members of the community to you? (2) Are people whose software is more liberally licensed (and may wish to incorporate parts of yours) not part of the community to you?

Presumably companies who are not willing to give back to the community are not part of the community for them, nor are people who enable people who do not give back to the community part of the community (in certain cases). (The community, of course, being "people who are willing to keep their work available to all other members of the community".)

OP clearly said

> never giving back

AGPL allows companies to use the product, while also guaranteeing that they contribute back. And community = entities who contribute back.

The AGPL is about the operator of software not being legally allowed to hide nefarious code on their servers that harms users.

The problem is that if you're a big enough monopolist prooviding some online service that people have to use, you can do that in the open. You just comply with the AGPL and reveal all the code that tracks users or discriminates or whatever Bad Stuff. At the end of the day, the code is still running, and vast numbers of users are still logging in.

Basically, the AGPL has no real teeth; it gives the users no real control over the program they are using, only some visibility into it.

Nefarious behavior can be hidden in configurations, not just code. And in other services. Like suppose a server program, at some point in its execution, makes a HTTPS request to another server. The URL, including parameters and an POST data, are driven by data from a configuration database. Oops! Who knows what the heck that is doing? But, hey, if you want to run such a thing on your own machine, here is the source code.

If a company took your code and made a service people like and enjoy with that code, how is that not benefiting the community? The bsd licence gave us the iPhone. Doesn't that benefit mankind?

If I only wanted to provide a service people used then I'd just start a company and charge for my product. This is about getting a fair deal in the case where I distribute my work for free. I'm not OK with a company turning around and profiting off of it without paying their fair shair, whether that be a licensing fee or by giving back to the community.

Its users may like and enjoy it, but only ever as users. The community has lost the right to shape the project as they wish. The software becomes a tool of influence over its users. I don’t think that benefits them.

> The bsd licence gave us the iPhone. Doesn't that benefit mankind?

The BSD license gave Apple a start to build the iPhone; Apple gave us devices that we aren’t given full access to even though we ostensibly own them. No, I’m not sure that’s a net benefit for humanity.

There is the option of buying Android. If people choose the iPhone it's because they don't care about having full access to the phone, or even see that as a positive because of malware concerns. So if so many people freely buy iPhones, it's because they like them.

Should you not compare the mean benefit to some community for the two cases of releasing the code either as BSD or as AGPL? Of course you will have to include counterfactual scenarios, rather than what you did: summing up the total benefits of only observed scenarios.

Obviously, averaging over counterfactuals is difficult, if not impossible in practice, so people go with intuition. It remains up for debate which way is the better basis for a ethical decision theory.

> The bsd licence gave us the iPhone.

I wouldn't put it like that. It wants to "bill" people for a grand each, and gave billions to some company. But most importantly, what about the guy who wrote that BSD code - he didn't die unable to buy medicines for cancer? No? Then it's all good.

The project is the service that people like and enjoy.

On the other hand, if a company did that, would it actually impact you or your project? It's not that it'd be vanishing just because of that.

The way I see it, it doesn't matter if it impacts the project or not. It's about getting a fair deal for the effort you give to the community, not protecting the project. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the Googles of the world making a profit off of my work for free. If they want to use the code, then they can pay their due and purchase a licensed version or give back to the community.

You deeply misunderstand what the AGPL is about; what are its motivations. It has nothing to do with preventing profit.

No I don't. It's possible to belive in free software principles and also care about the AGPL for reasons not spelled out in its preamble.

The question is not that, the question is how many people would be motivated to work on community-facing open-source projects then? Would you be motivated? "Show me your code".

Otherwise, we're all carriers of petty human nature. And few people enjoy thoughts that for time you've torn off from your family, to help some random strangers (and user support is biggest time/effort sync for open-source project, and what makes them popular), risking family problems (re: Reiser and his FS), the eventual benefactor will be some company, making money on the popularity of your project.

The only thing that non-A GPL allows them to “hoard” that the AGPL does not are their own modifications. Your hard work is still available to the community.

I don’t consider the AGPL to be free software. My freedoms to keep my own code to myself should not change based upon whether or not I am running a web server process on my machine or not.

I think it’s just generic anti-corporate/anti-business sentiment dressed up as egalitarianism. ASPs are a feature, not a bug.

> The only thing that non-A GPL allows them to “hoard” that the AGPL does not are their own modifications.

The point of the GPL family of licenses is not to solely make the author's "hard work available to the community". It's to ensure that any modifications which are later provided to other users must be licensed such that those users can make their own modifications.

Private modifications are still permitted under the AGPL. In fact, the FSF explicitly states that licenses which disallow private modifications are not free software.

> Your hard work is still available to the community.

That'd also be true if you used CC-0 or made it public domain. That's not the point of using one of the GPL licences.

> My freedoms to keep my own code to myself should not change based upon whether or not I am running a web server process on my machine or not.

The AGPL doesn't say "if you run apached on your server you must release your code to everyone who asks for it". It says that people who use your software over a network must be given the source code.

And in the context of SaaS and "online-only software" it's pretty clear why such a provision is necessary -- in the nightmare scenario, all software would be only accessible over the internet and you'd have no rights to the source code even if the code was GPL. You might not agree with this measure or the plausibility of such a nightmare scenario (and that's fine), but there is a clear ethical argument for it (and it is consistent with the history of the free software movement).

In the AGPL version of the nightmare scenario, all software is still accessible only over the Internet. You have all the exact code, but running it yourself has no meaning because users and all their data will not migrate to your installation (which doesn't even have the capacity, but never mind that).

The code does all sorts of nefarious things in plain view, but you're powerless to change the installations of that code. You can't stop using those services because life depends on it. Hundreds of millions of them continue to use the services, forcing you to do the same. Most of them don't understand the code or your objections to it.

If the fictional character Don Quixote came up with a software license, it would be the AGPL. It's full of nice sentiment, but ineffective and self-defeating.

> You have all the exact code, but running it yourself has no meaning because users and all their data will not migrate to your installation.

Free software licenses are mostly about your rights. You can host your own instance with your data. Stallman said on many occasions that it is not possible to exercise software freedom using a service hosted by someone else -- there is a fundamental clash between the freedoms of the users and the freedoms of the administrators. Both groups should be able to exercise their freedom, but unless the users are all administrators (of their own instances) there will always be a mismatch.

> Hundreds of millions of them continue to use the services, forcing you to do the same.

This is a fair point when it comes to social networks, because the AGPL doesn't require interoperability or the ability to federate (such terms would make little sense in a copyright license meant to be applied to all sorts of works). The real-world example would be the "fediverse" -- you could imagine a circumstance where all fediverse servers decide to block instances that don't implement $BadFeature. I would argue that in that nightmare scenario there really isn't a great solution even in theory. If you require interoperability, you've restricted the software freedoms of the other operators and now people can no longer block bad actors. But I would argue the AGPL does make the situation marginally better -- at least you could run your own (isolated) fediverse.

> You can host your own instance with your data.

No, you cannot host your own global social network with millions of users, your own search engine with billions of web pages indexed, your own online shopping marketplace, not to mention your own online banking, insurance company, med lab result site, drivers' licensing site, government tax site, ... not even if the original sites run nothing but AGPL-ed software in a fully compliant manner.

> you cannot host your own global social network with millions of users, your own search engine with billions of web pages indexed, your own online shopping marketplace, not to mention your own online banking, insurance company, med lab result site, drivers' licensing site, government tax site

The key emphasis was on your data. You can't run your own Facebook clone, but you can run your own version of Google Docs that you use on your own data.

There is simply no licensing solution that could fix the software freedom problems of such services, so it's unsurprising that the AGPL doesn't help...

Since when is free software about the freedoms of the owner of the software? You're trying to gaslight a new definition of free software that is going against the user of your software. When you look at the four software freedoms you will notice that not even once is the author of the software mentioned. Your definition of free software is 100% incompatible with the four software freedoms.

>A program is “free software” if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.

>The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

>The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

>The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

By running a modified GPL project on a web server without allowing access to the source code to users you are violating all 4 software freedoms at once. Users can't run the same software as you do. Users can't change the program because they have no access to the source code. They can't redistribute modified or unmodified copies.

>My freedoms to keep my own code to myself should not change based upon whether or not I am running a web server process on my machine or not.

The user's freedom should not change based upon whether or not the free software is running a web server process on a machine or not. This is the exact opposite of your argument and it is in line with the four software freedoms. Therefore your argument has nothing to do with free software.

> By running a modified GPL project on a web server without allowing access to the source code to users you are violating all 4 software freedoms at once.

That is nonsense. Firstly, you can't violate freedoms, only exercise them or not.

You're just running the program as you wish, for any purpose, exercising the first freedom. Since you modified it, you obviously had freedom to study how it works and change it how you wish. You haven't exercised your freedom to redistribute the program.

> The user's freedom should not change based upon whether or not the free software is running a web server process on a machine or not.

Yes, it should; the server is my private property.

It is a social problem that people are allowing themselves to become locked to SaaS programs, and those programs are blackboxes whose behavior changes on a whim, and can be nefarious.

That problem can't be solved by turning free software licenses into screwed-up non-free licenses.

Even if you have the exact source code of some SaaS, that still doesn't help you because you don't control the installation.

Users who are stuck with some system that they are pressured by others into using cannot just walk away from it just because they don't like what some piece of code is doing (in plain view, thanks to AGPL compliance).

If your understanding of the four essential freedoms and whom they apply to were correct, then someone using a kiosk that runs GPL software would be entitled to a copy of the source code.

This is covered in the GNU licenses FAQ [1]:

> Does GPLv3 require that voters be able to modify the software running in a voting machine?

> No. Companies distributing devices that include software under GPLv3 are at most required to provide the source and Installation Information for the software to people who possess a copy of the object code. The voter who uses a voting machine (like any other kiosk) doesn't get possession of it, not even temporarily, so the voter also does not get possession of the binary software in it.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html

Why is anti-corporate sentiment not an example of egalitarianism?

Seems to me that this is the paradox of intolerance... being intolerant of intolerance is a reasonable stance for otherwise tolerant people.

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