This is a first. If anything, it seems clear that a FLOSS license such as AGPL achieves exactly the opposite: is highly protective of the users' best interests, both in the short term and long term.
Could you elaborate on why do you think that users are harmed by standard, run-of-the-mill FLOSS licenses?
However, if you are a 'user' in the sense of a company wanting to make software to sell as a service, it doesn't protect you very much, and can make you vulnerable.
*Assuming it's not a memory-store as a service, obviously.
However this is rather uniquely due to Google's monorepo infrastructure. Google quite literally has all its products in the same source code repository, being built and statically linked together to create a single system binary (or so I am told--I've never worked there). In this case AGPL would virally infect the rest of your code and you could find yourself in trouble. Even if they don't, they might get hit with a discovery request for the source code of some project to prove compliance, and in the process have to provide their entire monorepo and all its business secrets to the court. Etc. Etc.
But these are concerns which stem directly from Google's monorepo architecture. It's not generally true of the whole industry. And yet Google's fear of copyleft--rational though it may be in their particular instance--has been copied throughout the entire industry. 99% of the companies out there have nothing to fear from the AGPL. But hey, if you're some random in-house lawyer at company XYZ, who are you to question Google's legal precedent?
That does not meet the definition of "user", does it?
In addition, if that was the motivation behind that absurd claim, why not be honest and just say "we don't release our software under a FLOSS license because what we actually want is to keep it proprietary"?
I could convince a legal team to allow an AGPL service, depending on how we were using it. It would be difficult to get them to allow us to use this license, and I definitely couldn't convince them to allow us to contribute to software using this license.
Effectively, you've ensured you won't have a community, because in reality the project is closed source, and dead if your company dies, which means it's not an option for me to consider.
I hope people will understand the reason behind bsl. I hope people will see apache there and will help us to grow. Based on HN comments some already do.
I understand the emotions people have regarding licenses that do allow them to work with software as they please - but I also think it’s useless to argue around licensing of a software instead of focusing on the good it can do. Something being proprietary has NO impact on your choice to buy it when outside of the software world. Why does it here?
I do have practical first hand experience with both. I can get a legal team to approve the use of AGPL, but I cannot get them to approve BSL, unless we've signed a contract with the company.
Having an understanding of the license, and some first hand experience seems like it would be a pretty important thing, when choosing it, especially for a business.
BSL is at least making an attempt to address the legitimate concerns of businesses -- both sides -- in a balanced and pragmatic way. I have no dog in this fight, being neither a BSL licensor nor licensee (nor AGPL for that matter), but having been party to the legal conversations at large companies I understand why BSL is generally considered to be more acceptable than AGPL. BSL may or may not be the right license for this software, I have no opinion, but businesses don't care about arguments from ideological purity. If BSL satisfies their requirements better than AGPL, and anecdotally all the evidence seems to support this notion, then they will go with BSL software.
To put it another way, if OSI is serious about being in the conversation about the future of software licensing, they must address the reasons so many companies refuse to adopt AGPL software.
Transferring copyright to another company, without a contract with that company, for the most part is something a legal team isn't going to agree to. BSL only addresses one side's concerns, and it's not in your favor.
AGPL, when used for internal services that customers don't interact with, is generally not that difficult to get approved. How many companies are using mongodb, for instance?
Also, smaller companies like to play safe. If FAANG with their million lawyers aren't touching it, why should I take the risk.
If it was AGPL I'd have been a happy camper though.