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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

What are your thoughts on Stallman explicitly saying that selling exceptions is fine [1]?

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

Here's the opening paragraph from your link.

> Selling exceptions means that the copyright holder of the code releases it to the general public under a valid free software license, then separately offers users the option of paying for permission to use the same code under different terms, for instance terms allowing its inclusion in proprietary applications.

Crucially, Element is not trying to sell an exception as the copyright holder. They want you to sign a CLA, because they want to sell AGPL exceptions code you wrote, and they are not a copyright holder of your code.

> I wouldn’t consider any of this open source any more.

Stallman's term is "free software", this said "open source".

I use OSD to define it, so I consider it technically open source, but to me it's open source that isn't under an acceptable license.

Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same thing, just looked at from different angles.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

“In practice, open source stands for criteria a little looser than those of free software. As far as we know, all existing released free software source code would qualify as open source. Nearly all open source software is free software, but there are exceptions.”

Not to me it doesn't. When the thing is a movement in the software community, the perspective changes the essence of the thing.

You’re free to adopt whichever perspective you prefer. But Free Software is always Open Source. That’s an objective fact.

The way around isn't true though, which you claimed when you wrote is essentially the same

The difference is that open-source forces you to think about code, whereas free software about your freedom.

The term you're looking for is "permissive". It is open source, but it is no longer as permissive as it was.

I know that term, but I don't think it's that much more clear. When someone forks the code and makes changes but doesn't contribute it back to the community, them having been allowed to do that is more permissive. However, what outsiders can do with their changes is less permissive.

There's no shortcuts to making a nuanced topic much more clear.

However, it is a frequently used term, so it's useful for quickly referring to these licenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_license

I also didn't say that this type of license is the only kind that is acceptable to me. I like copyleft, including AGPL, and for me it depends on the context. In this situation, I want a vendor neutral federated chat tool. There already is one, XMPP, and Matrix has long been putting itself forth as the successor. However, they just made the reference implementation non vendor-neutral.

Stallman’s point (which I largely think is a cop out, fwiw) is that the goal should be that the software remains free, and that making small compromises to further that goal is ok. Repositioning your software to be nominally free but actually picking a license that maximizes the chance that people pay you for a proprietary version goes against this spirit, because it’s clear that you don’t actually have software freedom as your priority.

> Stallman’s point (which I largely think is a cop out, fwiw) is that the goal should be that the software remains free, and that making small compromises to further that goal is ok.

Mm, that doesn't really summarize (or engage with) Stallman's thinking on the matter.

Stallman's position is that if it is perfectly ethical for someone to license their research under e.g. BSD, MIT/X11, or a license that is similarly permissive, and it is (of course) ethical to license it under GPL, then it is not more unethical to go with something which sits in between the two (copyleft for some, permissive for others).

To put it another way: if Alice picks a GPL-compatible, free software license like Apache 2.0, and then Goog makes something proprietary out of it, then Goog is being unethical, not Alice. If Goog does the same thing and gives Alice money, then nothing changes except the bad actor has less money and the good actor who created the software and made it libre has more money.

This doesn't make sense, though, because Alice could just pick a permissive license and claim that everyone who uses it to make something proprietary is being unethical. The whole point of the GPL existing is to prevent people from doing this, because going "oh it's on them for ruining things" doesn't actually work.

What?

Your claim, if I understand it correctly, is that selling an alternate license is OK because you're not doing anything unethical directly; after all, you're offering your version with the code. If they don't provide their source, they're the ones being unethical, not you.

I don't think this actually works, because if you look at the reason GPL exists in the first place, it's to prevent precisely this kind of move. It is "immoral" to release your code under a permissive license, not because you are doing something wrong, but because you are enabling someone else to come in and take that code and make proprietary changes. So selling a license to let someone do this seems like the same thing to me.

My claim is that my characterization of how Stallman thinks about this is an accurate characterization of how he thinks about this.

> It is "immoral" to release your code under a permissive license

That doesn't jibe with the FSF philosophy at all. I get the feeling that I'm interacting with someone who "knows" more about the FSF and Stallman based on what they've heard or imagined rather than actually reading what either Stallman or FSF have to say.

Permissive licenses like the X11 license are free software licenses and have the FSF's (and Stallman's) approval.

I called Stallman's point a cop out, so I quite frankly do not care very much about his position here, because I think it explicitly goes against what he espouses elsewhere.

I think the real cop-out is wading into a discussion with a comment purporting to explain/address a public figure's "point", and then when it is explained that you haven't portrayed it accurately, declaring you don't actually care about what their position is.

If you didn't have software freedom as a priority, then why even pick an open source license? To me they are trying to find a way to make a living, while still working on free software. It seems to me like a win-win situation: users get more free software, and they get to pay their bill. This is not always possible with every kind of software or business model though.

Because being open source gives them a marketing win. The number of people who would contribute to this is higher than the number that would contribute to a proprietary license.

AGPL is a more free license than BSL, which is the most likely alternative for a company like Element.

If the proprietary version is what they prefer over free and open source software, and which they are not allowed to distribute and modify, and which are otherwise completely identical, it's no skin off my back.

If they don't want freedom for themselves, that's on them.

The whole point of copyleft is that the proprietary version is going to have changes in it that are not free, which are not contributed back. If they want to go "oh we can sell you an alternative license but you're not actually allowed to change any of the code, so it's just strictly worse than AGPL" only the stupidest of legal departments are going to go for that.

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