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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

It's not open at all. I can't offer this as a service with my non profit org, because the non profit still needs a 10€ annual fee to exist. I can't make improvements that truly belong to the community. This is an attempt to fight off capitalism with private property, which means it only tries to fight off capitalism that doesn't benefit them. If you're going that way, might as well close source it.

AGPL allows all of that, allows you to run it as a service, allows you to earn money, and if amazon ever reuses it you have access to their differentiating sauce so the playing field is leveled profiting everyone, including you. Most likely though amazon won't use it, which is also the original goal.

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> I can't offer this as a service with my non profit org

You mean make a hosted dragonfly a service you provide? (I'm not sure why the €10 matters - maybe I'm missing something) Yeah, that's exactly the point of that licence. You can do it in 5 years if you want.

> You mean make a hosted dragonfly a service you provide?

Yes, why not ?

> (I'm not sure why the €10 matters - maybe I'm missing something)

That's a standard fee members pay to cover expenses the org may have

> Yeah, that's exactly the point of that licence. You can do it in 5 years if you want.

Good! At least there's a recognition of not being of public service and not doing this for everyone but only for themselves. I wish they chose another license, but it's a start

> Yes, why not ?

That's one specific case out of all possible uses that's not allowed with this licence. It honestly doesn't sound like much of a limitation. It would also be an extremely weird service to run as a non-profit.

> That's a standard fee members pay to cover expenses the org may have

Yes, but why did you mention it? It seems irrelevant to the question of what service you can build.

"I can't use it for one particular use case that >99.999...% of users never want to run in the first place, therefore it's not open at all and might as well be closed source" is quite the take.

Why bother then? Using this as a component makes you enter the "a substantial set of the features or functionality of the Licensed Work to third parties as a software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar services that compete with Licensor products or services" zone, and it can be interpreted in any way. How do you make sure your product isn't a derivative and is different enough for lawyers?

This only really applies if you're offering direct access to the Dragonfly wire protocol or something along those lines, not if you're merely using Dragonfly it as part of your product. Building, say, a Twitter clone on Dragonfly is perfectly fine. You're interpreting this exceedingly broad.

We do not fight off capitalism in any way. Rather, I view capitalism as a powerful engine driving innovation. My experience as an engineer at both Google, a massively profitable entity that contributes significantly to the open source community, and AWS, which effectively utilizes open source software to bolster its own success, has shaped this perspective. I harbor no resentment towards AWS; instead, I see both approaches as legitimate strategies within the scope of a capitalist system. I firmly believe that companies in the open source space need to rise to the challenge of competition and devise effective strategies to thrive in the marketplace.

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