Hacker News Reader

Comment by Abroszka | Hacker News Reader

> As far as I understand it they want to preserve "open sourceness" for self hosted projects - ie. if you run redis in your docker/vm/k8s, you're fine. But if mega corp clouds are offering managed service, they need to give back a cut from premium they're charging end users.

I like it and I think this is how open source should work to thrive.

View on HN

The world would be a very different place if, say, the people that wrote apache httpd felt this way.

I don't know what it would look like, so I won't weigh in on whether or not it would be a good or a bad thing. But it would assuredly be different.

If a webserver were to use this license it would still allow most enterprises to use it as a web server (IIUC) except if you are offering an open proxy service.

All websites and even value-add proxies likely would not be impacted

I think you're underestimating the impact that the webhosting industry had on the popularity of Apache httpd, all of these related ecosystem projects like PHP, MySQL, etc., and even Linux itself. How many small businesses launched because cheap and good webhosting was plentiful? How many developers cut their teeth making web apps that worked on the average cPanel/WHM webhosting provider? The answer to both of these is "A lot. A whole lot."

The butterfly effect would be massive.

I did not think of this, if I understand the license correctly an AGPL webserver used to host third-party websites would only require the ability to download the source of the webserver, while a whit SSPL it would require the ability to download the source for both the infrastructure and the hosted application.

Definitely a different tradeoff that many would not have been confortable in choosing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com