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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

The future of open source continues to be AGPL.

[EDIT]: referring to (my own) article: https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...

Shouldn't be surprising as it is the only OSS license that protects your right to repair by guaranteeing source code availability. FSF doesn't get enough credit for their foresight.

Yeah, and a while ago there seemed to be people who didn't think it was F/OSS, and wanted to avoid it because it might reduce the likelihood of someone contributing.

One thing I do think that people misunderstand is that a company can absolutely take your project and run it as a service -- they just have to contribute code back if/when they modify it.

The real canary is requiring signed CLAs.

True. Someone here in another comment has already pointed out that this project's CLA demands that all submissions have to be under the MIT license! This seems shady and can be perceived as an attempt to "steal" code in the future (MIT licensed code can be incorporated into xGPL license code, but it doesn't prevent the original license holder of the xGPL product to close source the product in the future. If the contributed code was also AGPL, the project managers would have to get permission from all submitters to close source a project or would be forced to remove their code from the product).

I don't see that they have a CLA -- I can only find their note about the license contributors must take[0].

I guess that's one way around the CLA -- they don't need one if they force all contributions to be MIT in a file most people wouldn't read.

In the end people the actual likelihood of someone making a credible legal threat is low so it all seems somewhat spurious but great way to go around the overt beacon that requiring CLA signing is.

[0]: https://github.com/OpenSignLabs/OpenSign/blob/bb846442ecbaa3...

For a project that deals with signatures it should be pretty obvious that this does not quite work in a legally sound way. At least in the PR they will need some prove that I acknowledge to have read this Contributing.md. They is a reason why people go through the hassle of CLA signing flows. Wonder why they do not dog food their own system.

AGPL still allows somebody else to offer your software as a paid service. This is dangerous for a lot of business models.

This is correct -- in fact, the article I posted goes over exactly that (though it is somewhat buried).

> There’s one caveat everyone is missing this is only a problem if you planned on modifying the software and not contributing back!. If you either do not modify the software or contribute back your changes you’re free to host and offer services built on AGPL.

I'm a bit worried about what all these companies will do once smaller/larger players change their stances appropriately and start hosting their software as a service. Will people run to BSL/Elastic/SSPL?

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