The Enshittification of Open Source

If you don't like a project's license, that strikes me as a "you" problem. Projects follow their own goals and they might not align with yours or your business' goals. You're always free to write your own software.

If the possibility of future license changes bothers you (and there are legit reasons why it might) then by all means, do NOT sign a copyright assignment.

> "Enshittification" describes the process by which something becomes degraded or corrupted.

I feel like many get this wrong, it’s not just “when things get worse”, the term was coined specifically around the phenomenon of investor-owned companies putting profit ahead of user values, leading to a degradation of service, combined with platform stickiness keeping users locked in.

That isn’t what’s happening here, if anything selling open source code without contributing back more closely aligns with enshittification, which is what these licenses prevent.

This is really a conversation around positive vs negative freedom. Is your freedom to profit off my code greater than my freedom to benefit from your modifications of my code?

If you’re going to call out the AGPL for introducing restrictions, maybe you should call out the original GPL for introducing restrictions as well?

Lumping the AGPL in with the Elastic license feels intellectually dishonest.

did you really think the powers that be are gonna let us think we're still free? freedom to invent and produce we are not deserving of, because it takes away from dishonest shadow elite who only know how to profit from destruction and sowing chaos. don't you get it? they hate that we're free to thrive without them!