What the FOSS community needs to ensure is that users can always differentiate between a FOSS license and a modified version which has subtle but profound changes. Our best defenses there would seem to be trademarks and social pressure. "That's not actually the AGPL, and calling it the AGPL causes confusion in the marketplace."
SaaS is effectively a loophole. You can use 100% open source software to create something that is actually far more proprietary and that offers less user freedom than old school closed source applications. Yes the user can theoretically get the code but it's painful to operate and meanwhile the SaaS application has all the user's data.
Open source is rapidly becoming free labor for closed SaaS and a tool to accelerate the lock-down of user data in the cloud rather than a tool to expand user freedom.
People are trying to roll their own licenses to deal with these problems since the OSI is providing no leadership.
There are no such problems. The “problem“ supposedly raised by SaaS is, in fact, an issue widely recognized as inherent to FOSS licensing before the OSI existed.
> Open source is rapidly becoming free labor for closed SaaS
“Free Software commercially redounds to the benefit of whatever for has the most resources to build and sell non-licensing services around it“ is not a new thing with SaaS. It's been recognized widely since the early 1990s.
What's new is people feeling entitled to a viable business mod for VC-funded startups that can free ride on FOSS-centered goodwill, without actually being FOSS.
People are letting the idea of open source as originally conceived eclipse the goal of providing freedom to the user.
It's a pretty common thing. When an idea doesn't turn out exactly as people wanted, it's very common for people to double down on the idea to the point of even turning against the original goals of the idea. This is what open source is doing. The license is more important than what the license was intended to achieve: freedom for the end user.
It seems the OSI is siding against Neo4j and with the SaaS by saying Neo4j had no rights to remove the right to sell the software from the SaaS company who decided to remove the added clause preventing them from selling Neo4j.
Just like the GPL ensures that while Microsoft could take Linux and sell it, they’ll have to make their changes open again.
If you mean that the SaaS provider has a private fork of someone else's code, and won't publish that fork... well, AGPL already exists for that. But here's the thing: in order for any license to close this loophole, you need to create a licensing term that obligates the user to publish private forks. These terms will inevitably either restrict the user's freedom to run the program, or the user's freedom to modify the program. I don't see why we should be calling restrictions on either freedom[0] to be Free Software or Open Source.
My personal feeling is that companies that are adopting "SaaS-loophole" copylefts are looking for the street cred of being source-available, while still being able to wield copyright in the way one would with proprietary software. Hence the Commons Clause that bans commercial endeavors on top of the already difficult-to-comply-with Affero clause. If you want to be paid, just... demand payment.[1] That's what proprietary licensing is for, and you are never going to close the "SaaS loophole" in FOSS while still remaining in the spirit and letter of FOSS.
The thing about SaaS is that it wasn't invented this decade. Even back in the 80s and 90s when FOSS was novel, you had massive IBM mainframes that could be partitioned, virtualized, and rented out exactly in the same way Amazon does today.
[0] GPL and weaker copylefts are tolerable because said licensing provisions only trip on distribution. Ordinary users do not need to worry about GPL compliance until they want to give someone else their code. This is a feature, not a bug.
[1] Are FOSS support contracts still a thing?
No. The end user is the one using the SaaS service, not the company providing the service. AGPL is there to give freedom all the way up to the end user. Also, there is no private fork in this scenario.
Furthermore, there are plenty of situations involving a network, other than SaaS, in which both the client and server could be considered end-users. For example, a WordPress site. The people who own the site and the people viewing it are two separate sets of end-users with their own freedoms to protect.
Under AGPL when a service is provided to the public it is not a private fork or private execution.
That's the whole point of the AGPL.
I may not agree with bad license edits, but I'll defend them under the right to the free speech of the developer who is shipping the code.