USAL: A New Source Available License | Hacker News Reader

USAL: A New Source Available License

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1 pointjinmingjian9 comments

USAL distilled:

* The license is clear that you can anything to the licensed sources except the (re)distribution.

* With USAL, the advantages of Apache License are inherited, while the disadvantages of Apache License are avoided. (for "open source" infra startups)

* BSL breaks the greatest feat of open source, USAL fixes it.

One of the big advantages of open source (and probably the most important one for many organizations/startups) is ensuring continuous access.

If you were paying for commercial license to developers before and the company behind the product decides to raise prices 100x overnight, or gets sold and closes down, you are screwed in closed-source/source-available case -- start paying more or migrate away from it. But in case of open source software, you'll likely to be able to find alternate source of support -- maybe a different community-maintained fork, or some independent consultants fixing the bugs just for you. This puts an upper limit on the software prices, which is great for consumers.

USAL specifically prohibits this - if you were dependent on USAL-licensed software, you might be able to get local engineers to support it, but you cannot collaborate with other users, nor you can ask any third parties to help.

Between this or BSL, I'd choose BSL any time. If something happens, at least BSL guarantees the software will become open-source eventually... USAL instead guarantees that software is lost forever.

"Third parties to help" is a good point. Although under the USAL, you can make "third parties" to become users.

Thanks for the suggestion! The USAL is new, it may be updated to allow pluggable additional grants to allow more flexibility, for example, if the licencor as a business entity does not exist, then the licensed works could be changed to another license.

This is basically entirely misinformation. There's nothing good or useful about this kind of software license.

YMMV.

But the Apache License is truly dead for startups. Most of "open source" startups are living on the VC investments. If a good business cycle cannot be built, the achievements of open source cannot be truly maintained. This is the author's usefulness.

> But the Apache License is truly dead for startups.

Maybe, but the right move is to copyleft, not to closed source.

Copyleft does not solve the problem: how to build a positive business cycle. No company seriously contributes to the copyleft. That is why the Apache License is raising. And you can see that all changed licenses mentioned in the article are not copyleft. Copyleft is great for licencors, but most of companies in the world, does not want to share their customs. This is the businesses.

The Linux kernel is almost the only one in the world and cannot be copied.

For business, the copyleft is combined with proprietary license. So business gets "pro" version with no copyleft requirements, while open-source users get the same code under a different license.

And a lot of the companies mentioned in the article have moved to BSL, which _is_ copyleft (after a few years of delay), or to SSPL which is arguably even more extreme copyleft than AGPL.

It's misleading to call the BSL and SSPL copyleft, because while they are viral, they're not free.

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