The future continues to be AGPL
https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...
What would be the goal of a license between AGPL and SSPL on the spectrum? Seems like such a license would at the very least be non-free? (which is perfectly ok)
Whether this would be considered non-free is up for debate IMO. Why would a license like this be considered non-free when the GPL is free? Is it the scope of it? The OSI would hate it because they represent the organizations this is meant to curtail.
Though most of this is moot if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it.
Do you consider the SSPL to be free? If so, this would be. If not, it probably would not be. Why does SSPL require unsatisfiable numbers of dependencies by the way? It seems pretty clear to me (though, clearly, not free).
> if you can just launder code through a LLM and magically remove any licensing for it.
If you can actually do this, I look forward to unencumbered Windows-compatible source code having run variously leaked source through copilot.
> In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment
FSF is not the average recipient of copyright assignments - I'd be much more comfortable giving copyright assignment to FSF than to pretty much any other entity:
* They're much less likely to rugpull on the contributors and change the licence to something non-free: even pessimistically assuming their leadership got subverted somehow, doing something like this would pretty much be the deathknell to FSF. So there's a known, very high cost to the negative side of CLAs.
* They're much more likely than the average project or corporation to actually use the positive benefits of copyright assignment, to pursue legal action and enforce the Free licences the way it empowers them to.
It seems like what's bothering him is:
> give a single entity, the project steward, a special license distinct from the one that everyone else gets, so that they may use your contribution in any way they please
But that's not a justification.
The project steward is contributing more than 90% of the code, maintain the infrastructure and servers, do the promotion, ...
So yeah, they may give some condition to accept your contribution, but I think that's fair. They don't force you to contribute. And depending of the motivation for your contribution, you get what you want, eg, the feeling of contributing to an open source project presumably used by many people, or having that entity to maintain your patch for free.
I mean, you can fork if you like, but the likelihood that your fork is getting used is not that big, and mean more work from your side to maintain the change.
In a CLA-restricted project, there's only one entitity that can contribute copyleft code. Everyone else must donate the code to them, and they forbid themselves from using other people's copyleft code, because they can't relicense it.
There's a famous talk about this, which resulted in many us referring to Oracle and its billionaire CEO as the "lawn mower."
I think in this situation it might have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it's Microsoft. Also, they're well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc.
I think another important point might be that "free software" aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.
In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send them code dumps containing the hacks people have done to private Linux source trees. They want proper commits that are done well and have been modified to comply with any feedback that they provide.
What the project maintainer here wanted were collaborators who would work with him as a team (which is not much different than what most OSS developers what), but no license requires that and it is rare to get that.
AGPL may not have convinced Microsoft to collaborate.
And the upstream and buy the product and get the same rights as a user.
But first and foremost it's about the users.
It's not as much about the collaboration by the vendor per se, though users would likely prefer it, and are themselves able to collaborate on equal footing.
I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.
It was particularly problematic for the FOSS companies because each of these players' plans was to resell the Big Three clouds and live off of the margin, so the instant that the cloud providers decided to just directly compete in the hosting space the original company physically couldn't compete on price.
The moral of the story is that if you're releasing cloud software as FOSS you can't plan your business around the idea that you'll be the only hoster.
I think this isn’t a problem — not everyone has to contribute to any project! People sometimes struggle with the choice between GPL and MIT for similar reasons of popularity.
People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff
This subthread started with the implication that people shouldn't be doing that. But you are right, that's exactly what most are doing.
There’s no reason to worry about the AGPL unless you plan to conceal code from its users. Most software businesses take this approach because it’s hard to sell information that is publicly available, and code is just information. Some businesses make money operating software for others. AWS pays on-call engineers to keep RabbitMQ highly available.
Free Software protects the user from the developer. Permissive licenses protect the developer from the author.
A lot of professional software engineers get confused and think of themselves as the “user” when they’re actually more of a middle man.