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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing stopping you from doing that, but it's not FOSS and you can't use a FOSS license to drive your growth.

I've seen some pretty wild license clauses in things claiming to be FOSS lately...like license termination if you don't support trans rights or if you're anti-furry.

It is FOSS, it's just not a free meal for FAANG & co.

How would you make the distinction, in a way that is legally enforcable?

I can understand why people would prefer FAANG & Co. weren't re-selling their FOSS, but I don't see how you can pick and choose who has access to and is allowed to run your code, and still be open source. Maybe you could have an application process, where you decide to give a license on a case-by-case basis, that can be rescinded later. But I'm not confident you'd get much traction.

The OP's point is that product owners want the benefits of being open source, but are frustrated with the downsides. You can't have one without the other, they are two sides of the same coin.

FAANG & Co won't touch AGPL, ditto for most enterprises. There are some exceptions in countries with weak IP enforcement on smaller players.

Interesting. Why don't more of these open source companies complaining about being cannibalised adopt AGPL instead?

Many of them are going AGPL, including the one we're discussing. Also recently Minio and the Synapse Matrix server from Element.

What's the benefit of SSPL over AGPL? (You can probably tell I'm not an expert in this!)

Wouldn't it be possible to have a license that gives different rights based on some binary indicators, e.g., annual revenue (or profit), an individual vs. a corporation, etc.? In theory, this could be gamed, but perhaps it wouldn't be worth it in most cases.

BSL usage grants sometimes do exactly this (free if you have less than X annual revenue) or similar (free if you're not competing with the company behind the project).

But it's technically not open source since there are usage restrictions, and considered "source available" which isn't descriptive enough IMO.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the people who develop some software and run a business doing so, wish to not have their livelihoods cannibalised out from under them by some larger entity.

I think the sunshine and rainbows idealism of some of the licences and OSS gatekeeping was fine 20 years ago, and works fine for certain kinds of software and mature, well-established projects (compilers, Postgres, MySQL etc) but these days, no longer fits the reality of the software landscape.

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