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Comment by 5e92cb50239222b | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, it was never about developer's freedom at all. FSF puts user's freedom first and foremost. From that point of view, AGPL makes a lot of sense (even if in practice it is almost exclusively used as a poison pill to sell proprietary licenses).

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Copyleft licenses like GPL are about user freedom, permissive licenses like BSD/MIT/Apache are about developer freedom, and COSS licenses like Elastic and SSPL are about freedom from competition.

aptly put .... freedom from competition license are pernicious and against "open source" whatever definition you adhere to. Just a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Elastic and SSPL are essentially source-available evaluation licenses for proprietary software. Which per se is fine. If that's the best business model for you, sure, go ahead and all the best to you.

Just don't go and try to eat the cake and keep it too, by claiming you have some kind of 'open source community' driving your growth.

SSPL is a free software license, just like AGPL but slightly stricter.

Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I am not paid by AWS to comment on HN on Free Software matters, on which I have my own personal opinions.

SSPLv1 is not a free software license. It is constructed to have unsatisfiable obligations that, in practice, restrict how the program can be used for completely legitimate, legal, and ethical purposes. Because the obligations cannot be satisfied, the license restricts the freedom of the user, thus software licensed with SSPLv1 is not Free Software.

See also the blog post from Bradley M. Kuhn, one of the main Free Software organizers who led the work to draft the Affero GPL and AGPLv3 licenses. [1]

Additional disclosure: I (personally) am a Software Freedom Conservancy Sustainer [2]. Consider donating if believe in fighting for digital rights, including rights to repair and improve software.

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

[2] https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/

Kuhn's post seems to be based solely on ideological arguments and seems to be mostly critisizing the company's actions rather than the license. I will personally disagree regarding the unsatisfiable obligations part. As for restrict how the program can be used for completely legitimate, legal, and ethical purpose I have also heard it about AGPL :p

The defects in SSPLv1 were raised by the community during the review process when it was submitted by MongoDB for comment. It would be redundant to re-enumerate them in a blog post like Bradley's, which already tend to be on the long side. ;-)

MongoDB acknowledged that there were improvements needed by drafting a v2 that attempted to address a number of them. But that draft was never finalized, or put into use on any software provided under SSPL license today.

From this I can only conclude that the goal is to use a maximally defective license (since there is an objectively better version proposed), with the expectation that no one who works diligently to work within the license requirements will touch it.

I believe that is right, AGPL is great for users.

AGPL is a license, a contract between developers of software and users of that software. It gives certain rights to both parties.

I think it is often implied that AGPL is somehow more "ethical" than other software licenses. I don't know why some people may think so and would like to hear the main arguments behind that. Is all copyright evil as well?

The AGPL requires contributing back more code which can be interpreted as providing more benefits to users.

Plenty of software freedom advocates do believe that copyright is evil and copyleft is essentially using copyright against itself as a temporary stopgap until copyright can be abolished completely.

If you take any two software licenses they probably differ in some detail about what benefits they provide to users.

What I don't get is why it is considered more ethical to provide more benefits to the users? Wouldn't Public Domain then be the most ethical license of all?

The hardcore free software position is that proprietary software is unethical, and while permissively licensed free software (or public domain) per se is fine, they allow such software to be co-opted to produce proprietary software. And thus copyleft licenses are better as they remove that temptation.

Right proprietary software is the root of all evil, I get it, is some people's position. But what are the arguments that made them believe so, that proprietary software is unethical? How and why (do they believe) "proprietary software" is unethical?

Well, I've been around FOSS my entire career, I've read a lot of RMS's writings, contributed to GNU projects, and to be honest, I don't know. Except that RMS got really really mad for not being able to fix a printer driver. I'm not sure free software philosophy would stand up to serious scrutiny from a moral philosophy perspective.

One could argue that society as a whole would be better off if zero marginal cost things like software or poetry, or information in general, would be freely available to everyone [1]. But that raises the question how such public goods ought to be financed. In today's capitalistic society it doesn't seem like a very serious proposition. In today's world, the choice is often not between proprietary software for solving problem X vs. free software for solving problem X, but between proprietary software for solving X and no software that solves X. And I don't think society as a whole is better off by not solving problem X unless we have a FOSS solution.

[1] Even that has limits. We probably don't want detailed instructions for making, say, biological warfare agents publicly available.

Makes sense what you say. If we declare that nobody can own (and sell) copyrights then we are very close to saying that nobody can own anything. Then who would get the "goods"? The strongmen, those with biggest guns and most selfish and cruel characters. Jesse James?

Only by uniting and making laws, including contract-law, can the weaker actors, the majority, guarantee a fair and better society for everybody.

I do like the GNU copyleft licenses I think that is a great idea. But then to say that because I released my software under copyleft everybody else must do the same, or I call them unethical, sounds self-serving.

I don't believe that society would be better if "zero marginal cost things like software or poetry, or information in general, would be freely available". Is there any evidence of that?

Human nature is that people will produce what benefits them --and others-- the most,. Therefore they choose to grow crops that give them the biggest profits. Think about pharmaceuticals who invest billions in research for new medicines only because patent-laws exist. That does not mean we should give them unlimited power to exploit their patents. We can make a law that progressively taxes exploitative pricing, however that is defined.

nope. AGPL has no clause to say you have to contribute back. you only have to PROVIDE source to your users. thats all it does.

How is contributing back different from providing the source?

you can keep your fork independent from upstream meaning you can decide to not give your "contributions" to upstream. providing source means if you do not do the changes in your fork to upstream, any of "your" users can take the changes and push it upstream provided they accept that PR but you are under no obligation to do so, just give the source.

contributing back would mean whatever change you put in your fork must reflect in upstream which is not something all upstream users would accept always but its not a requirement.

I don't see how that's practical. If a project requires "contributing back" and then doesn't accept the changes, the fork can't exist?

i said, AGPL does not require contributing back. there is no clause demanding that. a fork can be independent of changes to upstream as long as they provide source to its customers/users.

You are only required to provide the source to your users, not to the original developers.

When does a developer stop being a user? If I want to use an open source IDE to write some commercial software, is that user freedom or developer freedom? Is it within a user's freedoms to use a software for any kind of monetary benefit at all even if it has nothing to do with software development, like for example using an open source text editor to write documents for work? If so then what's the difference?

User of the software vs developer of the software

As the user of an IDE, I should be able to develop my own modifications for it. Any users of my modifications should also have that same right.

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