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Comment by cvwright | Hacker News Reader

The community has been trained over many years to believe that anything FOSS is immediately trustworthy, and that anything non-FOSS is immediately untrustworthy.

This gets exploited all the time when companies use FOSS licenses to get traction, then pull the rug and switch to a more restrictive license once customers are locked in.

On the flip side, if a company tries to be honest from the beginning by using BSL (or similar) they get endless grief from religious zealots.

AGPL is the magic unicorn license that is just restrictive enough to protect you from your competitors, while still passing the FOSS religious purity test.

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Actually that’s not true. I’ll not trust VSCode/ium or Chrome/ium with anything.

We trust Free Software not because of the license, but because of the ecosystem and number of eyeballs. Go tried to pull something similar by forcing telemetry on everyone, and they were almost burning everything down. Almost.

People/companies get vilified when they change licenses because of the way they do it. They don’t openly say that they need the money, did some mistake and need to change things to keep company afloat, but they also change their tone after license change and vilify the past contributors and become aggressive themselves.

There are many friendly open core or closed source companies out there, and I trust them with my code, data and secrets, and pay them without any hesitation.

Software ideologies are something, so the real world. While I’d love to see everything as Free Software, we’re not there yet, we might never be, and that’s OK. I’m writing Free Software and try to use Free Software as much as I can to show my colors and do my part in the thing I believe. But I’m never a mindless zealot spewing things.

> People/companies get vilified when they change licenses because of the way they do it. They don’t openly say that they need the money, did some mistake and need to change things to keep company afloat, but they also change their tone after license change and vilify the past contributors and become aggressive themselves.

What? I can't think of any examples where they don't quote money and the lost revenue from hyperscalers just taking their software and reselling it without contributing. InfluxData's CTO and co-founder even wrote a blog post on open source monetisation and how hard it is. Elastic, Mongo even explicitly pointed the finger at Amazon. Many others smaller ones did it preventively, like Sentry and Sourcegraph.

I've also never heard any vilifying of past contributors, outside of bickering about the meaning of open source (I think it was Mongo that claimed they're still open source with the SSPL license?).

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