Hacker News Reader

Comment by intheleantime | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com