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Comment by jeo123 | Hacker News Reader

Not touching this AGPLv3 software. Every company I work on ban any software with that license. This will be a niche project or " propietary" to orginal developers. It is open-source for users using. Unlikely to see any open source developers contributing it back. Good luck.

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I mean, we have 89 contributors... What are your concerns with AGPL? The practical difference is the clause that SaaS distributions require to be licensed as AGPL as well. Would you plan to take this, add commercial features and repackage as commercial closed source system?

It spooks company lawyers. The AGPL's "license transference at a distance" is scary from a legal risk point of view. Many corporate legal departments forbid it, or at least getting the exception approved by legal is so painful as to not be worth it.

Correct but the reason for that is the fact that all of the sudden companies are forced to contribute back if they want to offer commercial software on top of the labor of OSS projects.

Again, I agree with the reasoning for libraries, devTools, infrastructure etc given that those libraries end up in commercial products. However in the case of full fleshed enduser applications AGPL is a great protector against the amazons of the world.

For device manufacturers, GPL3 is just as onerous as AGPL.

As an end user, I'd rather not use GPL3 software that has a carve out that enables the software to be used by privacy hostile service providers that routinely force-upgrade their user customers to worse versions of their systems, but that prevents people from just sticking a customized version of the software on a gizmo and selling it to me.

After all, I can least air-gap and not upgrade most gizmos.

Anyway, I wish they'd rename AGPL to GPLv4 so the infamous "or later" clause applied to it.

Are you for or against the Affero?

Depending on the side your choose, could you explain a bit more on how and why Affero helps or does not help in the 1990s purpose of original 1990 license?

As someone who would love to contribute: AGPL means nothing if I have to sign a CLA that gives you the ability to switch licenses on a whim. You will have much less contributors for this reason alone, while also scaring away customers.

> As someone who would love to contribute: AGPL means nothing if I have to sign a CLA that gives you the ability to switch licenses on a whim. You will have much less contributors for this reason alone, while also scaring away customers.

but then AGPL is not the problem, CLA is, right?

Nothing stops you from forking it. I also dislike CLAs from a developer perspective, but I understand why companies require them. In particular, the CLA is likely going to make investors happy, and the investors pay the bills, at least initially.

If the investors eventually stop paying the bills (or if the set of people that want to contribute is larger than the set of people the investors will pay), then fork it. This seems like a win-win, in that developers win because they get Free tools, and in that developers win because the get paid well to develop open source software.

Not just investors. I had long conversations with legal about that to better understand why it is necessary. Don't get me wrong, I don't like it either but here is the deal:

- I want this project to be a success (and open source) - To make it a success I need to live - To live I need to pay for food

Commercialization in OSS is pretty straight forward as there aren't many options: - Support, managed hosting, paid plugins/features, sponsors.

With the exception of Sponsors, all of these require a number of changes to code and infrastructure that should not be public and this would not be possible without a CLA.

Ergo: CLA -> OSS Developer gets to live.

Yes, it does open the door to license changes and that is a whole other story. But what it boils down to is that funding an OSS project without a CLA is basically impossible.

I like to quote the gnu article on pragmatic idealism:

> The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says no to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing—that the GPL “excludes” some proprietary software developers who “need to be brought into the free software community.”

But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot “bring them into our community” if they don't want to join.

What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: “If you will make your software free, you can use this code.” Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.

Proprietary software development does not contribute to our community, but its developers often want handouts from us. Free software users can offer free software developers strokes for the ego—recognition and gratitude—but it can be very tempting when a business tells you, “Just let us put your package in our proprietary program, and your program will be used by many thousands of people!” The temptation can be powerful, but in the long run we are all better off if we resist it.

Related to your quoted content, do you consider the Elastic License and Server Side Public License (SSPL) to be the 2020 updated version of the 1990 pragmatic idealism or do you consider them to be not similar in any way at all?

What exactly is the problem with AGPL if you just want to use it within your environment/company? It is no different than other OSS licenses in that sense.

Related to your understanding of licenses, do you consider the Elastic License and Server Side Public License (SSPL) to be the 2020 updated version of the 1990 pragmatic idealism or do you consider them to be not similar in any way at all?

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