My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

Right off the bat there's a pretty serious error:

> There’s been a lot of discussion about licensing in the news, with Red Hat and now Hashicorp notably adjusting their licensing models to be more “business friendly,” and Codecov (proudly, and mistakenly) pronouncing they are now “open source.”

Red Hat has not adjusted any of their "licensing models." They've simply stopped publishing the RHEL sources publicly. They're still published and fully available to paying customers, who are the only ones they are legally[1] required to distribute them to. None of the licenses (GPL, MIT, etc) have any requirements to publicly distribute code.

[1]: there is some dispute over whether the customer agreement violates the GPL in spirit or letter, but that's a different question. It's not a licensing thing, it's a business agreement/contract that is completely separate from the licenses. The licenses don't require you to do business with people you don't want to do business with, and they don't require you to give away your product for free.

I'm not sure what the overall point here is. The headline and article are framed in a way that makes it seem switching from GPLv3 was the catalyst for increased profitability but this is never clarified or quantified:

Two years later, Sid at Open Core Ventures (OCV) contacted me about creating a company, building on the features and functionality of authentik. It was a dream opportunity: work full time on my hobby project and make 25% more in the process. But I had to let go of the GPL license.

It seems the investors stipulated the license change to secure funding versus the change itself resulting in increased profitability. And the justification seems based on speculation about marketability:

The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add, and they will sooner find a competitor with a more permissive license than adopt your software. This is obviously not ideal when you’re trying to get traction and grow a business.

OCV proposed we switch back to MIT.

Obviously something like the MIT license is more attractive to corporations. Now they can just steal all your hard work, integrate your code into their commercial product and not even have to pay or so much as credit you now. I'm sorry, it sounds you may have just been hustled out of your app.

Is GPL vs. MIT even relevant in this case? GPL only requires providing sources with the distributed binary, but for server-side code you don't distribute the binary so don't have to publish sources. The whole point behind the AGPL is to close this loophole.

Further I don't think the change to GPL even fixed the author's original concern of something like AWS taking it and standing up a service on it. The GPL wouldn't prevent that because again, no binary distribution.

I don't doubt that the author was told this by Sid at OCV, but it seems like a misunderstanding on both their parts of what the licenses actually require and don't require.

>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add...

That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.

I looked at OP's account. No comments at all, and every submission leads to his own website. Many of them marked as [dead]. I thought this was strictly against HN guidelines?

The author talks about several very different issues: (1) him switching between GPL and MIT, both of which are open source licenses, (2) Hashicorp switching to BSL, which is not an open source license (by the OSI definition), (3) Red Hat providing sources as per GPL requirements to paid customers only and stopping to provide it to the whole world (there is more to it when you remember how red Hat started, why CentOS appeared, how it they were bought etc.). There is only some superficial similarity between these two (as the author says, nobody objected when they switched from GPL to MIT).

I'm curious about this line:

  As a company and a real legal entity, we would have recourse if something like AWS/Elasticsearch were to happen

What does that mean? Didn't AWS just take advantage of the terms of the license and do something they were allowed to, couldn't the same thing happen here? What recourse would there be?

The article is confusing.

The difference between MIT and GPL is that MIT favors immediate users who are developers, and GPL favors end-users. These interests are always in tension, and one of them just be chosen as favored.

In both cases, the original authors are giving up their rights for the benefit of users.

So no one has standing to attack the original authors. If you use the original software, you can enjoy it either way. If you are in business, MIT is better for you. If you are a user of an intermediary, that's for you and the intermediary to deal with, no the original author.

If you are afraid of the intermediary being evil, than go directly to the original source, or find a GPL or MIT(!) intermediary.

> Initially, authentik used the MIT license. When Elastic called out AWS for trademark abuse (offering Elasticsearch as an AWS service without collaborating with Elastic), I changed it to GPLv3 because I didn’t like what AWS did in principle, and didn’t want it to happen to authentik.

GPLv3 doesn't protect SaaS users anyway! That's the whole point of AGPL. lol

IOW, GPLv3 doesn't prevent Amazon or Google or Microsoft from offering a hosted version of your project without sharing source code changes with customers.

Hope this continues to work. Commercial version costs all of $.02 per external user per month. I hate auth so this seems like a no-brainer.

Types of freedom:

Gratis: Free as in beer.

Libre: Free as in "freedom" (for end-users, not developers).

Coexisting: Free as in culture (share and share alike, or pay up ).

Tl;dr: "I would like to justify my decision to dump the GPL for money."

I have switched a couple of my more popular projects from OSL:

https://opensource.org/license/osl-3-0-php

to non commercial:

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0

people always howl that "its no longer open source", and maybe that's true. but the source code is still on GitHub as its always been, and you can still do whatever you want with it, as long as its not for commercial purpose. I offer a commercial license for a fee. so despite the roar of complaints from open source purists, it works for me.