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Comment by matesz | Hacker News Reader

Wait, AGPL is a good license for enterprise, they don’t need to buy unless they want to modify source without releasing, am I wrong about this?

Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good

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The goal of free software (noting that "open source" is a watered down version of "free software") is for everyone to share their sohrce code. To that end, licenses that require sharing of source code are used. LGPL says, roughly, you must share the source code of this software to anyone you shared the binary to. GPL is more extensive: anyone you shared the binary or the binary of something built on this software to. AGPL is even more aggressive: anyone you shared it to or gave access to it over a network. And SSPL is currently the most aggressive: you have to share the whole thing you built, not just what's linked with this software.

The more aggressive a license you pick, the more likely a corporation won't want to use it. But that's by design. They're allowed to use it, even commercially - they just have to give the source code back. If the software is useful enough, they will. We should make software useful enough for corporations to consider the be benefits of using it to outweigh the cost of having to share their source code. (Also the more source you make them share, the less likely this is. The Linux kernel succeeded at this.

SSPL is controversial and untested (and goes against the business interests of the OSI so will never be box-tick certified compliant) and likely counterproductive if it means you have to share things like Windows. AGPL is the normal "aggressively free" license. GPL is mostly for those who haven't discovered AGPL yet and MIT is for those who don't agree in the goal of source code freedom to begin with.

SSPL isn't recognized as either open source or free software. I don't think it earns being discussed in the same context.

only because OSI says so. I don't agree with the idea of OSI defining my philosophical positions and technical terms for me, just like I don't agree with the BSD people excluding GPL from the definition of open source.

I'm sympathetic to the OSI not being the only authority. So, have the DFSG, FSF, any BSD, or literally anyone credible endorsed it as Free and/or Open Source?

None of the folks you list have, only other FOSS-adjacent movements like Fair Source etc.

None of them have bothered to evaluate it or have explicitly decided it's not worth evaluating for now. They haven't endorsed it as Proprietary and/or Closed Source either.

And notice the OSI's objection actually makes no sense and could apply to any copyleft license! By the same reasoning, AGPL isn't open source. Yet they say it is.

> None of them have bothered to evaluate it or have explicitly decided it's not worth evaluating for now. They haven't endorsed it as Proprietary and/or Closed Source either.

That's not quite true. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License , Debian did explicitly reject it (in addition to listing OSI and Red Hat likewise), citing https://web.archive.org/web/20240226231216/https://bugs.debi... -

  However, the SSPL is clearly not in the sprit of the DFSG, yet alone
  complimentary to the Debian's goals of promoting software or user
  freedom.

  In light of this, the Project does not consider that software licensed
  under the SSPL to be suitable for inclusion in the Debian archive.

> Edit: Doubled checked with gpt, no cases of “infection” yet, there has also been many talks about this license being very good

what? why would you ask an LLM to generate some random text instead of looking up the actual answer?

Hi, it’s the year 2025

the alternative is/was BSD.

enterprise hates AGPL. AGPL is generally not a serious alternative to BSD/MIT in corpoland, because something something (A)GPL-poisoning.

whether it's true or not doesn't matter. what matters is whether big tech considers AGPL infectious - which they do.

> whether it's true or not doesn't matter

It matters a lot. A company could potentially make choice that saves them a lot of money, so they better base their decisions on accurate information rather than rumours.

(Note also that big tech have different incentives)

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