Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch | Hacker News Reader

Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch

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343 pointsLaSombra322 comments

I have just created a task to find an alternative in case 4.x cannot be used anymore.

I have nothing against someone trying to monetise useful software. However, switching from an open-source software (OSS) licence is essentially a bait-and-switch tactic. This immediately destroys trust. It also destroys the part of the user base that is difficult to monetise but still has the potential to be monetised. I was hoping that the Elastic and TerraForm debacles had taught people a lesson.

Flyway is also questionable at this point. If Liquibase is switching, what's to stop Flyway?

Unless a fork is happening, I'm considering creating my own migration library tailored to our actual needs and usage. It should not be so hard. Liquibase was more of a convenience.

I would add EventstoreDB (now KurrentDB) and NATS to the list of questionable service providers. The former has already relicensed it's service, and the latter had also intended to do so, they just chickened out after seeing the reactions and resistence from their user base. It's really become a business strategy at this point to pull the rug below the users.

I thought NATS was a project under the CNCF, with the trademarks being transferred to the Linux Foundation, which is why they couldn't relicense NATS, and why they can't relicense it in the future.

The beauty of open source is you can always fork the previous version. I don't see how it's anymore of a bait and switch than a vendor raising the price of a product.

> I don't see how it's anymore of a bait and switch than a vendor raising the price of a product.

That's often called bait and switch if a subscription price is hiked significantly.

No relation. This is free, open source, where you can fully use, modify, and continue it as far into the future as you want. A paid model, you lose access if you don't adhere. With this, you're losing nothing except future development time, which you were previously getting for free. These are completely different things.

My naive interoperation of this comment section says there were quite a few people making money on this work, without helping them pay their bills.

The ability to fork something doesn't mean its viable or reasonable for everyone. That's a risk to users in case of both extremes: bait-and-switch tactics (mostly due to commercial motivations) or abandoned projects (see ASF Attic).

> doesn't mean its viable or reasonable for everyone

Related, it's often not viable to give away something for free.

Was Elastic's relicensing a debacle from their perspective? Their share price did drop a bit after the announcement, but the company seems to still be quite healthy. For example, everyone I know who's working on search and RAG products right now is doing it with Elasticsearch. The version published by Elastic NV, not the Open Source fork or any other open source alternative.

And perhaps more to the point, their revenue now is about twice what it was in 2020. That's hardly the situation I would expect to see if the move had destroyed people's trust in the company. If anything it seems like it might have had the opposite effect, at least among the demographic that matters most to Elastic as a company: paying customers.

For users, it was more of a debacle, with Amazon being one of the biggest companies to rely on stable permissive licensing. Users who could not afford commercial licenses or were unable to accept the new license for legal reasons found themselves in limbo. I am sure that Elastic lost (potential) business to OpenSearch (and AWS). By how much is hard to measure. Sure, they were able to retain enough business. It probably attests to good service and product.

And AWS has agreements with services with similar services, eg MongoDB. Maybe elasticsearch asked for too much money, or AWS didn't want to pay out of principle.

It's Postgres specific but there is https://github.com/xataio/pgroll which takes the automation a step further.

Apart from Flyway (Apache), Atlas (Apache) and Sqitch (MIT) still use "Open Source" licenses.

Don't confuse the license with project ownership. Flyway is owned by Red Gate Software and the community edition of Flyway is licensed under Apache 2.0. Apache Atlas is owned by the Apache Software Foundation AND licensed under Apache 2.0.

I'm pretty sure they mean https://atlasgo.io/ and not https://atlas.apache.org/.

Ah, my fault. But that does not change the point I try to make: project ownership is equally important, if you cannot just fork and maintain some open source software yourself. It's something to include in risk calculations.

> I'm considering creating my own migration library tailored to our actual needs and usage. It should not be so hard.

Indeed. Go has like 5 options for SQL DDL migrations now. On python side there's alembic and bunch of homegrown stuff in various frameworks.

I think much of the complexity in liquibase comes from supporting various databases.

One thing to remember: mark a new version before each step that can fail, even if the steps themselves are together in the same file.

This is a problem I ran too much into with alembic in which each file is a single unit - a statement in the middle of the script fails and there's no simple way to roll back (unless your DB supports transactional DDL). So the pattern I have settled is to have only one simple change in one file. Liquibase of course doesn't suffer this because it has unique IDs per statement.

It takes some thinking, but you can just use plain SQL to do the migrations.

That amounts to creating own db migration tool.

Writing idempotent DDL is not that hard and then you don’t have the problem the migration tools solve (tracking state).

Which of course will give you around 10% of what liquibase and flyway do.

everything is always super easy here on HN, liquibase is just SQL you know :)

It takes some thinking, but you can just use rsync to build your own version of Dropbox.

If you use Python a bit, Alembic is a nice one - it's simple and Python is available nearly everywhere.

Alternatively if Liquibase is FSL it will technically be Apache in 2 years I think (not exactly sure how that works) but you could just go to the last non-FSL release and use that for 2 years.

I'm not exactly sure why people would need the most up to datest version of liquibase which just runs schema changes anyway. I used version 2 a bunch of years ago and it was just fine.

After reviewing the available options over a year ago, I decided to implement our own migration tool using https://dbup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (we have a pre-existing, sizable .NET codebase). It's worked perfectly for our needs.

What is their new license blocking you from doing?

The commercial use permissions look murky to me. But I'm not in the legal department.

What's more important is trust. What's to stop them from changing the licence again after evaluating the impact of the first change? Liquibase has collected "anonymous" metrics by default since version 4.30 (do they consider an IP address and timestamp as PII?). As soon as I saw that, I anticipated this scenario. It was not really a surprise. They have a way to analyse the impact. Now, I am reassessing the risks.

For those arguing it is still open source, Liquibase says it is not.

"Is FSL an open source license?

No."

https://www.liquibase.com/blog/liquibase-community-for-the-f...

If we want to be very picky it is "open source" not "Open Source".

The capitalised term indicates it's a license approved by the Open Source Initiative, which is commonly used as the basis of "actual open source"

(I do agree that this gets a little murky, especially with folks who don't understand the nuance, which is a large percentage of folks talking about this)

I do agree that not calling something even "open source" if it's under a license like the FSL is best

This was less than a month ago, so the README may not simply have been updated yet then, rather than the frustratingly large number of projects that are source available but want to brand themselves as something they are not.

Fair point, but it takes less than 10 minutes imho to update a README. Perhaps less than 1. And they took the time elsewhere to update other docs. So it’s fair criticism when a month later it’s still saying things that are no longer true.

So Liquibase made an open-source project, used Apache instead of strong copyleft (e.g GNU AGPL), and then expected others to not do the thing Liquibase chose to allow them: make closed-source derivatives.

Liquibase has only itself to blame.

It looks like they auto switch to Apache after some time. I am not sure if that makes it better or worse

Organizations can still achieve their goals with the AGPL instead of a source available license. Redis switched, and their own organization was pleased, as well as their community. I don't think any Liquibase user would be unhappy with Liquibase being dual licensed with AGPL.

AFAIK, AGPL is no-go for EPL/Apache-licensed projects, unless the whole project is under (A)GPL, or use some "exceptions" wording. Wrt Redis community, it's the shadow of the former itself, everyone who plans to invest in Redis long-term, moved to Valkey.

Regarding Redis, you mean that AGPL was not a good choice for them?

It would have been a good choice. They made the wrong choice, lost some community support and then they licensed Redis under AGPL.

Should probably be called "open source with a two year delay", or "open source in two years".

Or "open source when obsolete" because that's what it is, fundamentally. Of course, it sells less and makes it way more obvious what these delayed open source licenses are at their core: "we'd like to make people believe we respect their freedom, but are not actually convinced with giving them that".

Very little is obsolete that fast. I don't think it shows a lack of respect for my freedom. The goal is to place some (rather minor) restrictions on businesses, and businesses are not people.

> Very little is obsolete that fast

Isn't two years of security patch lag a big deal?

It's a dev tool that isn't taking untrusted input, right? Then no, I don't think security patches are a big deal.

Also I feel like "obsolete" is the wrong word for that.

Other than puritanism, what exactly stops you from using the FSL version? It's not like you're a hyperscaler hosting their product as a SaaS.

What you call puritanism is a fight for user software freedom to be recognized as a fundamental right.

Your phrasing is malicious. It waves off a 40 year fight from many reasonable people as extreme and ridiculous, or as religious-like.

Did you expect me to answer "no, nothing else than puritanism" to your question?

Well, I won't.

So you can use it just fine but because aws would have to pay to resell it you won't.

Again, that's a terrible presentation of the situation. It makes me look like I defend AWS.

That's like saying that although I could, I won't vote for candidate C who is against the freedom of the press when candidate C would prevent awful newspaper N from publishing its horrible bullshit.

I'd prefer newspaper N not to publish bullshit, or even to not exist at all, but I wouldn't want this to cost the freedom of the press.

AWS doing terrible things shouldn't cost us user software freedom.

Yes, indeed, there's stuff that I will do or won't do out of principles, of course! Even if it would be convenient to do otherwise! Is this an alien concept?

How is this difficult to understand that someone doesn't want compromises on rights that ought to be fundamental?

Since the supposed software freedom only affects resellers, one way to "look" less like you're out here defending aws would be to not spend 8+ posts defending aws.

It puts you in bed with a community where you're too locked in. If there's only one provider that's allowed to sell an online SaaS-based version of the software, then if they do a poor job of hosting it, or don't host it in a configuration that suits my needs, I literally have no choice.

I've written about this in other comments, but this happened to me in 2015 hosting Elasticsearch and the official Elasticsearch hosting offering just didn't support CPU configurations that were proper for geohashing heavy workloads. I had to switch to AWS to get that. They even talked to the head of sales, and they said, yeah, we're working on it, but right now your best bet is to switch. Under a license like this, that wouldn't be possible.

You can host it yourself, right?

But they can't pick a vendor who may host it better than the original authors. And the only reason for that is because the authors maybe would make less money that way.

"maybe would make less money" could be a catastrophic undermining of their business model, also ruining their ability to continue development, so I am very sympathetic to that reason.

Being stuck between "host it yourself" or "don't have the latest features" is pretty far from a rock and hard place.

I am even confused about this dichotomy. Like, who is NOT hosting liquibase himself? It is a dev tool.

Businesses are indeed people; they cannot think or act or plan or do. They are groups of people acting in concert. Without people, there are no businesses. Without people, there are no business initiatives, no products, no sales, no profits, no shareholders.

Businesses are precisely and exactly people.

When I said businesses are not people, I was pluralizing the claim that a business is not a person.

Yes a business is made out of people, but that's a very different thing from what I was talking about.

(And please don't mention sole proprietorships, what I meant should be plenty clear now.)

Except the fact that as I explained to you in another comment this is not true. Businesses are a person. Not the ordinary natural person, but a juridical person

Which is not a person.

We're talking about freedoms, not the ability to interact with the legal system.

That statement is not so true as you think it is though. Legal entities as companies for example are juridical persons in most countries. This principle is called company personhood.

Companies are legal entities with similar properties to people according to some parts of the law, but they're not people. Companies cannot be arrested, companies do not need to eat food, and companies do not retire. They have a small set of human rights and obligations without any human properties. Companies share an abstraction with people when it comes to some part of the legal system.

Company personhood and its implications and restrictions differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in countries like the USA the exact definition is still a matter up for debate.

That was already incorporated into what I said. I phrased it the way I did on purpose.

open source for enterprise is often more about trust and transparency than "freedom". Source avaliable has most advantages of FOSS without the legal and monetization issues.

There is this blind trust in open source model taken to a unhealthy or misguided extreme in a lot of online discussion.

A two year delay is pretty reasonable and liberal. It allow costumers that dont want to accept the new licence able to continue as-is by simply following an older version.

> There is this blind trust in open source model

In my case, it's not about any open source model, it's about software freedom.

What's unhealthy is non-free software, and there's nothing extreme in having this opinion.

It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses.

If you base your opinions on pure black and white tests without considering the actual tradeoffs of the license then that's blindness.

I've written this above and it's a point I don't see very many people make in this discussion, but you're locking yourself into an ecosystem that has a monopoly on hosting as a service. That damages you as a customer because you no longer have choice about what service you go to for hosting. You're left with either hosting it yourself or going with the only vendor who's allowed to. That's not a great experience.

It's not a hard thought experiment. Just imagine this license applied to whatever database you're used to spinning up in the cloud on whatever provider you want. If that one provider doesn't have the plan you're looking for, you're forced to take on the work of hosting it yourself because no one is allowed to do that for you and let you pay them because the license forbids it.

But thats not a discussion about free or not free software. That's a discussion about interoperability, standards and vendor lock-in.

Free software encurrage interoperability to a degree, but interoperability and free software are very separate things.

And hosting providers are not evil or bad for making highly coupled systems. Its a valuable service companies gladly pay for, and a compromise developers need to calculate in their plans.

That seems fine to me? If I want them to host it then I don't care a lot about the license, and my escape hatch of self-hosting is quite good. I don't think self hosting is a big burden.

And competitors can still host a mildly older version freely, so that prevents long term lock-in even if I ignore self hosting.

So the main company still has to compete to keep business, which is good for everyone, but they keep some control over the hosting business, which means they're less likely to get crushed and stop updating. I think it sounds good overall.

OK, but how do these concerns apply specifically to self-hosted dev tools such as Liquibase? Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software, which has a different usage pattern than a database server?

Because it's proprietary software. The GNU and the FSF website have written plenty about it:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author. Therefore, it's non-free or proprietary.

I was specifically replying to the GP, who commented about concerns of "locking yourself into an ecosystem that has a monopoly on hosting as a service". I wanted to know why that specific concern is an issue for GP, in the context of software like Liquibase which isn't even hosted in the first place. Your reply does not address that in any way.

> That license restricts what you can do with the software due to a business interest of the author.

Yes, it restricts you from offering a competing hosted service. Do you offer a competing hosted service to Liquibase using Liquibase's source code? Is this something you ever would conceivably do? If not, how does this restriction affect your life in any way?

> Therefore, it's non-free or proprietary.

I never claimed it was Free Software.

> I wanted to know why that specific concern is an issue for GP

That's exactly what my comment is addressing! People advocating for Free Software don't usually advocate that _only_ the software they use should be free; they advocate for the freedom of all users.

> I never claimed it was Free Software.

You did not, indeed. Sorry if my wording gave the impression I was trying to put claims in your post. That phrase is an answer to this question from you:

> Why do you object to FSL for this specific type of software

We object to it because it makes the software proprietary rather than free.

OK, so you care about freedom. And yet you tell other people how they should license their software projects, even when you aren't involved in those projects in any way, and their license choices don't impact you in any way. And you tell people what software they should and shouldn't use purely on subjective philosophical grounds.

Personally I call that something other than promoting freedom. Quite the opposite.

If you base your opinions on compromises and always making tradeoffs on your core values, you've lost your direction.

What do we do now?

> It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses

Nope. "Free" has specific meaning in this context, this qualifier doesn't apply here. It's the whole point. If you believe it applies, you've fundamentally misunderstood the free software definition and what's at stake for the free software movement.

More specifically, the qualifier is not relative to a specific entity and what freedom it actually needs / uses at some given point in time.

I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.

To go further with the comparison, there's nothing in being against compromising on the freedom of the press that's blindness or being black and white (or maybe it's being black and white, but I can't see how it would be wrong).

Everything is a compromise. GPL versus MIT is a compromise either way. Both are more free than the other. So don't tell me there's such a thing as fully free and that nothing else matters.

> I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.

Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.

I don't follow.

GPL and MIT fully fulfill the exigences of the free software definition, there's no compromise here.

Choosing between GPL and MIT may involve compromises, but we are talking about something else, you are moving the goalposts here.

(note: I kept updating my previous comment, probably while you were writing this, sorry for this)

(edit: ah, you noticed)

> Freedom of the press has more restrictions. In particular violating an NDA in your press activities is somewhat similar in how it affects few people and is time-limited.

Violating an NDA is a matter of law and contracts that can equally apply to software, it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.

If you are speaking about protecting one's source, then it's orthogonal (and probably also an important mechanism for) freedom of the press.

MIT gives less freedom to the user. GPL gives less freedom to the dev. I'm not moving goalposts, those are both very important and you can't maximize both.

> it's not at the level of the fundamental right or at the level of the license.

I would say the ability to run a competing business within two years is less fundamental than the ability to talk about what you saw at your former job.

Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.

> MIT gives less freedom to the user.

No. Someone can use some MIT licensed software for any purpose and can strictly do anything with it that the GPL would allow.

Just as free.

However, I do agree that permissive licenses like the MIT allows someone to build proprietary software with the code, and the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result. That would be the reason why I wouldn't license my software under permissive license except for specific cases.

One could argue the MIT actually gives more freedom to the user: they can, with a MIT source code, build and distribute a proprietary derivative. Of course, this doesn't mean this additional freedom is desirable.

> Also what are you saying about "not at the level"? It overrides the fundamental right, but people accept that.

Yeah, just like laws limit your freedom to run free software for any purpose. You, for instance, can't legally take /bin/ls with you to go kill someone even if its license itself doesn't explicitly forbid it. I'm pretty fine with this.

I have some feeling we do agree that freedom is never absolute and kinda argue past each others.

> the users won't enjoy software freedom with that result

That's the part I was talking about.

So I don't know why you started your post with "No."

> I'm pretty fine with this.

Cool. And I'm fine with some other restrictions. So we're agreeing that being fine with a restriction doesn't necessarily mean anyone has "lost the direction" of free software? And instead we can talk about the specific dangers of a restriction without reflexive rejection?

Delayed Open Source, and it's an old practice https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication

#source-washing

Late open source, with a double entendre on late.

For those who were not familiar with the licence they have switched to: https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/functional-source-license-...

For more context, the FSL was created by Sentry, who explain why it's been created and what problems it was trying to solve here: https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...

Is 2 years too little? The deep pocketed companies I know dont mind 5 year old software and I'll be okay with 2012 Redis or 2020 Postgres.

I think it is meant to be useable by them. It is meant to be unuseable by those who directly compete with liquibase.

The only closed source license I find acceptable is the BuSL "Business Source License" because it eventually becomes opensource. It guarantees you a 4 year moat on the code before it becomes open source, and it remains source available until then. This ought to be good enough for valid uses and prevents needless license proliferation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License

FSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too.

At this point, FSL appears to be more widespread than BSL. Adoption of BSL has waned; even its creators (MariaDB, for their MaxScale proxy product) recently stopped using it.

> FSL uses this "eventual open source" mechanism too.

I stand corrected. I hate license proliferation, but the naming and marketing is better. I hope the other former open-source companies consolidate on something.

> undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP). [1]

and that "DOSP" (Delayed Open Source Publication) is an OSI concept! [2]

But I cannot (yet) find what the timeframe for the DOSP is... because we don't want to wait 90 years for Mickey to be public domain.

[1] https://fair.io/about/

[2] https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication

That linked documented was sponsored by Sentry, who led the development of FSL. I don't believe it's accurate to call DOSP an "OSI concept" -- meaning, it's not something the OSI invented or coined. OSI also does not consider such licenses to be approved under their open source definition.

As for the timeframe, FSL uses a 2 year period.

edit to add: just to be clear, I'm a fan of FSL and Fair Source licensing, and do not consider lack of OSI endorsement to be a problem.

At least Liquibase isn’t masquerading under a well known open source license, unlike Neo4j’s infamous AGPL bait-and-switch.

Neo4j quietly slipped the Commons Clause into what looked like a standard AGPL license, complete with the FSF copyright and preamble, until a single person called them out.

Instead of owning up, Neo4j spent nearly a decade and tens of millions trying to crush one person. Not the best business minds over there…

Anyway - it sounds like Liquibase didn’t go to that extreme and fixed their messaging as soon as the community educated them.

Not to mention their pro features keep breaking syntax of the community version, obviously with 0 transparency.

Now, of course they should get paid for the work they do, but these sort of "we were FOSS and surprise we're not anymore" are becoming commonplace and are always done hoping no one notices.

Honestly, FSL doesn't break any flow for day to day developers. What's the harm? I am curious to know. On the contrary I like competitive vs non-competitive distinction.

Most of us don't want to let a court decide if we compete with a very general distinction you describe, and can't afford lawyers to evaluate a 2 year old license without much case law.

Most of us prefer not to bring on a dependency in our project that is primarily designed to extract commercial value from users and is less friendly to contributors than similar open source projects.

It’s because big tech companies have spent millions to foster goodwill towards the OSI Open Source definition. And there’s a general feeling that software that fits that definition is pure and any that doesn’t is unclean.

I've been collecting a history of this sort of thing, and list of companies here: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/on-self-hosting-opentofu-an... . I'll have to add this one.

Let me know if there's more I can include!

There's also https://isitreallyfoss.com

Akka by Lightbend (now called Akka)

What's up with the comments here?

Either just reading the "base" part and plugging some unrelated service, or claiming source available is the same as open source

Some people just don't find the distinction between "open source" and "source available" to be meaningful, or at least don't find it meaningful enough to warrant the outsized level of attention it gets. I can't speak for anyone else, but at least to me, "open" is pretty much synonymous with "available" in the way it's used in the term "open source", and despite this debate going on for years now I've yet to see an argument for why it makes sense for those terms to mean different things that doesn't essentially boil down to "because that's what OSI says". I don't find the argument that I should have to agree with the definitions from one specific organization for extremely generic-sounding terms to be particularly compelling, and if anything, the backlash anyone gets from conflating the terms purely based on those definitions as if they're the only morally correct ones just makes me even less inclined to buy into them. It's basically an attempt to trademark via astroturfing.

Huh, did not realise Liquibase changed their license. Seems a bit weird when basically every web framework has an alternative in house, and there's Alembic and Flyway as framework-generic alternatives.

Apparently this also poses a problem for OSS projects such as Keycloak since they can't use non-OSS licenses according to the CNCF [1].

I wonder if a project which uses Liquibase can be included in Debian, Fedora, etc.? Since these projects also have requirements on OSS licenses for the software they distribute.

[1] https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/issues/43391

> I wonder if a project which uses Liquibase can be included in Debian, Fedora, etc.?

Cannot be included in the main repositories, but nothing stops them from being part of other repositories (custom, or if something like rpm fusion non-free exists for Debian based distros as well).

This is a shame. We use Liquibase on my project and I have a few bugfixes / functional gaps that I was planning to contribute back but I doubt my large enterprise client would sanction contributions to a commercial codebase.

Why not, if liquibase isn't directly completing with your company and your bug fixes help their business, why would they care?

Big tech companies (the money behind the Open Source Initiative) have done a few things.

1. They co-opted the free software movement and made it more business friendly.

2. They convinced people that Open Source is pure and software that isn’t Open Source is unclean.

3. They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.

4. They convinced a well meaning subset of those developers to police the other devs and pressure them to release their software under big tech approved licenses.

Liquibase is also not free software. Most of these non-open-source licenses aren't free software. I'm not aware of any exceptions, but I'd be happy to see some examples if there are any.

The rest of your comment mainly seems to be a mixed bag of rhetoric. It obscures the reality that Liquibase is, to modify your words, "co-opting the" open source movement to make it "more business friendly."

I don’t love their license. But I think that a license that says you aren’t free to redistribute this software or it’s derivatives for a fee (including by letting users use it over a network) if you’re a corporation making over $1 billion a year in revenue is perfectly compatible with the original intent of free software.

The freedoms were about freedom for the user not a non user developer.

If you're talking about free-as-in-freedom software, promoted by Richard Stallman and the FSF, then they have always been clear that Free software must not forbid commercial usage or require payment. Vendors are perfectly free to sell copies of Free software if they wish, but the license cannot forbid making copies and derivatives, even for commercial usage. See:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling

The principles predate modern SaaS by decades. You can see it in the wording of the FAQ you linked. It keeps using the word "distribute" - meaning giving people a copy of the software to put on their own computer - as if that were the only way of commercializing software. Which it pretty much was in the 1980s.

There has been some revision over time, but there's an argument to be made that small revisions are inadequate to keep up with the sea change in how computing works that's happened since the turn of the century. The elephant in the room here is that SaaS, and especially cloud computing, has pretty well undermined the practical foundation for how the Free Software model was supposed to work for people who are trying to make a living selling Free Software.

Doesn't the AGPL from nearly 20 years ago address SaaS? Given that basically every big tech company bans AGPL licensed software, it seems like it provides adequate protection.

Yeah AGPL's intent seems to be to prevent people from commercializing the use of the software as an online service without providing source code.

The original use before the 4 freedoms were codified said nothing about the rights of non user vendors.

>the rights of non user vendors

Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt

>Because everyone was always a user

In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.

For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.

>In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.

I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".

>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.

Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:

```

This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art.

Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.

```

In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.

Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.

The world changes, everything changes. Already 20 years ago Stallman saw that his original idea was abused (tivoization etc.), hence GPLv3. In the web era we have a completely different set of issues to deal with, and one of them is the killing of incentive by the big three public cloud providers.

Back in RMS days, he advocated, for example, a RedHat-style business model where you sell Free Software with services. But when AWS takes your project and releases it as their service, good luck competing with them. This is a very real problem.

I didn’t think the idea of creating free software was to monetize it. If you create a software as “free”, then anyone including hyper scalers can use it.

Put out a restricted license if you don’t want hyperscalers to offer it as a service. Although they have enough software engineering talent to use the old version to create and maintain a fork (e.g. valkey, opensearch, etc.).

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

Those comments came later. Also making copies and selling them along with the source code is much different than the SaaS model that RMS didn’t predict.

If you think that the explicit reminder that free software allows selling is inconsistent with the original definition, then I think the onus is on you to prove that inconsistency. So far I read your comments as giving a sort of argument from silence that commercial transactions weren't explicitly mentioned in the earliest versions together with a gut feeling that your view is the same as theirs.

The original 1986 definition, which I see you referring to elsewhere, came from a news letter that's available here: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt

The news letter itself cost $1. And it also includes an order form charging $150 for Emacs ($443.40 in 2025 dollars). The tape and the manual come to $487.74 in 2025 dollars.

The issue with SaaS is loss of the freedoms, not that vendors charge money. Free Software was never about forcing organizations to break even or operate at a loss. If you believe that's inherent to the original definition then I think you'd have to present a clearer argument for that position.

   Free Software Foundation Order Form
       February 6, 1986

All software and publications are distributed with a permission to copy and redistribute.

Quantity Price Item

________ $150 GNU Emacs source code, on a 1600bpi industry standard mag tape in tar format. The tape also contains MIT Scheme (a dialect of Lisp), hack (a rogue-like game) and bison (a compatible replacement for yacc).

________ $15 GNU Emacs manual. This includes a reference card.

Thus, a tape and one manual come to $165.

________ $60 Box of six GNU Emacs manuals, shipped book rate.

________ $1 GNU Emacs reference card. Or:

________ $6 One dozen GNU Emacs reference cards.

Shipping outside North America is normally by surface mail. For air mail delivery, please add $15 per tape or manual, $1 for an individual reference card, or 50 cents per card in quantity twelve or more.

Prices are subject to change without notice. Massachusetts residents please add 5% sales tax to all prices.

I’m in no way saying that free software didn’t allow selling. I’m saying that it didn’t forbid licenses that added restrictions on vendors.

Thanks for clarifying. But I think that's the same thing in the context of the FSF's thinking. I believe you are arguing that missing freedom 0 implied a sort of compatibility with the non-commercial restriction (this is the argument from silence I referred to earlier). But from what I see, the incompatibility of non-commercial restrictions is forced by the logic. Freedom 0 was almost surely an attempt to clarify confusions and make explicit an implicit assumption.

There are really two issues here: one is what counts as copyleft (i.e. the ideal FSF license) and what counts as compatible with copyleft. The so-called permissive licenses like MIT and BSD are compatible with copyleft licenses in a way that licenses that restrict commercial access aren't. That's because these licenses don't add new restrictions but the non-commercial one does.

The abstract idea of copyleft is that it's a chain of rights grants A > B > C > D... where entities on the right have exactly the same rights as the entities on the left. In other words, copyleft preserves downstream freedoms, or ">" is a freedom preserving operator for copyleft software.

A permissive licensed piece of software X can be incorporated into copyleft software, say, B because X does not restrict any freedom required to be free software. However once incorporated, the chain becomes absorbed, you can't un-free the free software. So X >' B where >' is a sort of injection operation, but then everything downstream of B uses the ">" operator. X can also spin off proprietary copies of itself. Those are not compatible with free software, but they exist on a different branch of the rights grant tree and so aren't relevant to free software.

On the other hand a license with a non-commercial clause includes a restriction already. It's not a hypothetical restriction that someone else can add to a fork (as in permissive licenses). You can't take a license with a non-commercial clause M and map it into free software because, as you granted, free software includes the right to sell and the license doesn't grant the right to remove the non-commercial restriction. If it did grant the right to remove that restriction, then a fork that removed the restriction would possibly be compatible with free software.

What your argument amounts to in this framing is that even though A has the right to sell copies of the software, ">" doesn't have to preserve that right. This would require a stronger argument IMO, since (1) the freedom to charge is explicitly mentioned early even if it's not explicitly enumerated as one of the four freedoms yet, and (2) we have no examples where the FSF allows an entity on the left of ">" to terminate rights on the right of ">". That would break ">" as an operator.

The developer and the user are one and the same. Freedom for one is freedom for the other. Users should have the freedom to pay someone else to act as developer for them, as well.

These tenets are core to Free Software. Without freedom for users _and_ developers, there is no true freedom.

> perfectly compatible with the original intent of free software

The original creators of the free software movement would disagree.

You are trying to co-opt the free software movement for your own ideals.

You are mistaken.

I don’t think that I am.

The FSF never drew a distinction between users and developers. They considered all users to be developers and all developers to be users.

Might I suggest that if it's so clear cut as your comment suggests, perhaps provide even a single argument to that point?

This comment might as well just be "nah."

I don't see why, the original comment also gave no concrete reasoning beyond mere opinion.

Because it devolves into exactly what happened:

  "You're wrong."
  "No I'm not."
  "Yeah you are."
  "Nuh uh"
  "Yuh huh"

When people say something with no reference and no argument, the most they're owed is "no, you're wrong." If you give them anything else, it's a gift.

Nah.

> Most of these non-open-source licenses aren't free software

Free as in beer? They are. BSL and SSPL and FSL and friends are free, with some restrictions which are usually extremely reasonable and boil down to forbidding reselling.

In context of GNU and FSF, when we say free software, we always mean free software with the basic freedoms

    Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
    Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
    Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
    Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

If you do price segmentation and prohibit billion (trillion?) dollar companies such as Amazon.com from using it, it is no longer free software

You omitted an important clarification stated before those freedoms:

> The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom

It's free as in libre, not free as in gratis. They don't prohibit the exchange of money.

That is a moot point. It could be a million dollars but the person who received it can them pass it on for zero dollars.

Sure, but that zero-dollar copy comes with no guarantees from the person passing it around. You could, as a billion dollar company, provide the software freely but offer additional warranties and support for a licensing cost. This was and is a really common business model for companies that package Free Software for pay.

If you’re going to throw the commandments of software freedom at someone to make your point you do not get to exclude exactly the part that explicitly contradicts what you say with a dismissive “except that, that doesn’t count” because it doesn’t fit your ideas.

A license that gives freedom but not gratuity fits the rules you quoted. The general topic is far from an open and shut case so I’m happy to debate arguments with you, but not the lazy, disingenuous way.

> forbidding reselling.

You absolutely cannot forbid reselling and call yourself Free Software. So what are you talking about?

I am talking about the 4 rules posted by GP above [0] from FSF’s definition of free software, after selectively removing the part that wasn’t aligned with their point, then calling that part “moot”. I was not talking about the content of the article. The comment thread starting at the link below will provide all the context.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604819

Which freedom does that violate?

Freedom 0.

Amazon is prohibited from using it for their commercial offering.

Based on the current definitions. If we go back in time to the early 80s, there were no rights for non-user vendors being discussed.

I would not call all of them "extremely reasonable" - "forbidding reselling" also significantly discourages forking. If the original company is bought by Oracle/Broadcom, and raises the prices to unreasonable amount, all their users are likely screwed.

As a user, it's pretty important for me that someone can continue to provide software under reasonable conditions even if original authors can't.

(FSL and other licenses which convert to open source are much better in that regard, but there is no excuse for BSL / SSPL)

“They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.”

They adopted the existing Debian Free Software Guidelines as the Open Source Definition. The DFSG are good, actually, and represent an important community consensus outside the FSF.

They looked around and found the guidelines that most closely matched their goals. Specifically DFSG already included a clause about not restricting commercial use.

Also if you read the original DFSG the clause about field of endeavor has been interpreted by OSI differently from the intent.

It was about saying your license can’t prevent an end user of your software from using it for a specific purpose. It really says nothing about restrictions on how you can sell the software.

The problem is OSI is now the sole interpreter of the definition.

> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.

— https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Sure. That restriction came later.

It's not a new restriction it's a clarification of something that already followed from the original definition.

Why is that the problem? Trademarks are one of the three branches of intellectual property. The two words "open" and "source" look like generic terms, but "Open Source" has come to mean a relatively specific thing. So have Disney and Google and Coca-cola.

The DFSG and the OSD are the same text, but the OSI and the Debian project interpret it differently, and this difference is important.

Debian (and most other distributions, btw), for the most part (or entirely, I suppose), agrees with the FSF / the GNU project when deciding which license is free or non free. The OSI has a more permissive interpretation.

RMS speaks about that in a recent interview in French [1], English translation below:

> La FSF a financé Debian à son commencement. Mais rapidement, le projet, qui comptait plus de contributeurs, a voulu formuler une définition de la liberté différente, avec l’intention d’être équivalente.

> À l’époque, j’ai commis une erreur : j’aurais dû vérifier plus attentivement s’il pouvait y avoir des divergences d’interprétation entre le projet GNU et Debian. La définition me paraissait équivalente, même si elle était formulée autrement. J’ai dit : “C’est bon.” Mais en réalité, il y avait des problèmes potentiels.

> Plus tard, quand l’open source a émergé, ils ont repris la définition de Debian, je ne sais plus s'il ont changé quelques mots mais ils ont surtout changé l’interprétation. Dès lors, elle n’était plus équivalente à celle du logiciel libre. Il existe aujourd’hui des programmes considérés comme “open source” mais pas comme logiciels libres, et inversement.

> J’ai d’ailleurs expliqué ces différences dans mon essai Open Source Misses the Point.

English translation (not a native English speaker, I hope the translation is ok, especially considering that RMS is close to his words and it's probably easy to misrepresent him without noticing):

> The FSF funded Debian at its beginnings. But rapidly, the project, gaining more contributors, wanted a different phrasing for the definition of freedom, which the intent of being equivalent.

> Back then, I made a mistake: I should have checked more carefully if there could be different ways to interpret it between the GNU and the Debian projects. The definition seemed equivalent to me, even if it was phrased differently. I said: "OK". But in reality, there were potential issues.

> Later, when Open Source surfaced, they took Debian's definition, I don't know if they changed a few words but they above all changed the interpretation. Since then, it was not equivalent to the free software definition anymore. There exist open source software that's not free software, and conversely.

> By the way, I explain all this in my Open Source Misses the Point essay.

[1] https://linuxfr.org/news/40-ans-pour-l-informatique-libre-en...

Do you have an example of a license where the OSI and Debian / FSF disagree on whether it's free?

Yep, the Sybase Open Watcom Public License. The OSI considers this license open source [1], the FSF and major distros don't [2], including Fedora [3] and Debian [4].

It is notably used by the Open Watcom C compiler, which is used to compile VirtualBox's BIOS. Which is the reason why you won't find VirtualBox in most distros, including Debian.

The reason the FSF and major distros don't consider it free is that there are cases where you can't use it privately without releasing your modifications. The license doesn't pass Debian's Desert Island test [5]:

> Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.

I don't have an example of a license that the FSF / GNU project considers free and that the OSI doesn't consider open source.

[1] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Watcom-1.0

[2] https://opensource.org/license/sybase-php

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_Open_Watcom_Public_Lice...

[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=376431

> Oops... it looks like OSI smoked something especially bad this time, I'm afraid. This license looks like someone took his time to collect every single problematic clause.

[5] https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#desert_island

Yeah but MIT is a million times better than elastic 2.0 or other trash commercial "source available" licenses, I wish everything was GPL and all photos were creative commons but they're not and I'm not going to begrudge any business releasing a tool under MIT.

That's not my point. I mostly agree with that. But I'd go a step further and say in the real world Open Source software doesn't offer enough protections against big tech companies doing big tech company things with your software.

The license here isn't an exemplar of what I'm interested in. But the discussions on this thread are. Anything that isn't OSI blessed is bullied.

We are already OK with saying you can use this software however you want, but when you distribute it you have certain obligations/restrictions. I think it's fine to go a step further and say if you distribute this software and you make $1 billion a year in revenue, you can't charge for it.

I think that's fine the same way I think it's fine to say a company has free speech despite not allowing people to threaten murder.

Neither the free software definition nor the open source definition see someone else using your software as something that you need protection from. This kind of thinking is contrary to the entire idea of open culture.

Someone using your software (for whatever purpose) does not negatively affect you unless you depend on holding a monopoly over some aspect of your software - in which case you have already decided that your priorities lie elsewhere than free software - e.g. you want to build a business.

I mean I wanted to release a project under a modified license like "if your corporation laid off engineers in 2022-2025 you may never use this project commercially" language, but I think MIT might still be best. Software is trickier than licenses for things like images where licenses like creative commons BY-SA are really good because it guarantees the photo stays in the public domain but you can also include the photo on your website (considered a collection and you can still retain rights to your blog post). The problem with software licenses is that software is so much more composable. Like sure you can host a restrictively licensed project and call into it from your company's commercial app, but if you want to modify a module into your app that's tricky legally. Maybe I'm missing something here but I think the real risk is fake open licenses like elastic v2 (some YC company launched with it today) rather than the push for licenses like MIT.

So you have qualms about OSI co-opting free software movement

Then defend a source available license designed by a company that describes the license as intended for prioritizing business needs over user freedom and used, and is often brought out when businesses decide to switch a more available license to one that restricts commercial activity, co-opting public contributions that would otherwise never happened

INSTEAD of promoting copyleft licenses such as AGPL, seems a bit odd. We care about freedom, in every use case.

I don’t think calling it “source available” is being honest. It looks like you’re free to modify and distribute it all you want so long as you aren’t pulling an Amazon.

AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.

> AGPL isn’t battle tested enough for me to be confident it will protect against big tech doing big tech things like spinning off a separate company in Ireland to firewall AGPL software.

What does it matter if they do? The point of the AGPL is that if you make a version available to users over the network, either you release the source to your version or you can't use it. That subsidiary could still be made to release the source or stop using it. Wouldn't that be "mission accomplished?"

Not exactly. If you're not modifying your version you don't need to make the source available to server users. So if you contract out the modifications, and they only give the source to you, and you give the source to nobody...

I don't know if that scheme would work but I think "not battle tested enough" is valid.

Also there's some weirdness in how the availability requirement applies at the time of editing that gives me questions, but I'm far from an expert there.

Thanks. I hadn't followed that concern.

I think a plain read of the license would make it clear that the "distribution" obligation occurs when you make it available on the network to your users (regardless of whether you modified it yourself or paid a contractor to do so), but I'm not a lawyer, so sometimes what looks like plain text to me can have a specific meaning that doesn't make sense to me.

Well the wording is "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer[...]"

Starting with no trickery, there's a lot of circumstances where you could buy software from a vendor and confidently declare you didn't modify it. And that should be true even if you ask for certain features just for you. So there's probably a way to make the separation work.

I think that the contractor would be required to change the software to include a notice, and if you removed it you would be modifying the software again. I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.

My view is that if Amazon or Apple lawyers thought they could bypass the AGPL that easily, they would've done it already (just look at the stuff NVIDIA does to pretend that it's not flagrantly violating the GPL).

You can't change the code to remove the notice, but you could let the link expire. Or the frontend server, while adding your own branding, might remove the notice the backend added.

> I suspect a judge would not look kindly on such shenanigans in any case.

I completely agree there, but they still need to find the license clause sufficiently correct and in scope if they want to throw the book at you.

Why do you need it to be battle tested when you already know that that is allowed?

You're also forgetting that even if it was illegal, setting up a shell company in a foreign country means the shell company will be able to get away with a lot of outright illegal stuff.

Chinese tech companies can just take your code with no recourse.

The open source initiative was initially about hiding the political and philosophical aspects behind the free software movement (that's the second part of your (1)). (hence the "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software" essay [1]). With some benefit of the doubt, one could imagine that it was a well-meaning move to make companies do free software so we could all enjoy the freedom it gives, without them feeling they are doing dirty politics. This hasn't worked out: programs targeting end users are still proprietary for the most part.

I'm not sure what's bad about 2. What's quite bad however IMHO is the push to use permissive licenses and the anti (A)GPL FUD that these big tech companies spread. Of course it is very convenient to them that every library under the sun is under MIT or BSD, so they can built proprietary software more efficiently.

Note: the OSI recognizes the AGPL as an open source license so at least the set of "big tech approved licenses" is not the same set as the OSI approved licenses.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Many “big” companies would rather not bother with GPL, but the biggest tech companies don’t care when it comes to repackaging and reselling it as a service.

AGPL hasn’t been thoroughly tested in the courts, so it’s unclear how much protection it offers. It’s not beyond someone like Amazon to setup a new company just firewall off AGPL software.

> but the biggest tech companies don’t care when it comes to repackaging and reselling it as a service.

If I'm not mistaken, Apple would rather avoid touching anything GPLv3 with a ten foot pole. They are among the biggest tech companies in my mind.

Anybody seems fine with GPLv2 though. But GPL is less convenient than permissive licenses.

Of course, you can still indeed build services with GPL software without redistributing the modifications, which is the point of the AGPL.

> It’s not beyond someone like Amazon to setup a new company just firewall off AGPL software.

I suppose so. However, this would work as intended: the Amazon firewall company would need to redistribute the improvements.

Also, do you have examples of this happening? (not arguing, actually genuinely curious)

Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. Basically, a ""contagious"" or copyleft license as GPLv3 intended, but even more viral than intended in the AGPL variant since it extends well beyond the source software. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with how Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, *because they're otherwise the same as GPLv3 and have already been tested.*

I think this poster created the legal theory themselves because they were aware of other legal concerns with the AGPL affecting the above scenario. I've read a lot of legalblogging about AGPL, and none bring up this as even a remote possibility, because unless you think GPLv3 case law is somehow irrelevant then you don't think AGPL will be simply bypassed.

One last thing: I'm surprised the poster was concerned about AGPL being untested, despite it using GPLv3, and not that FSL has only existed for 2 years and has 0 case law surrounding.

> legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available

If I understand correctly what you say, this is one of the main concerns with the SSPL because of the following [1]:

> The SSPL is based on the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), with a modified Section 13 that requires that those making SSPL-licensed software available to third-parties (modified or not) as part of a "service" must release the source code for the entirety of the service, including without limitation all "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available", under the SSPL.

I'm not familiar with this concern for the AGPL itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License

Yes, that's the MongoDB variant which codifies it directly, and SF Conservancy and other legal entities promotion FOSS licenses states that the network stack contagion concern does not actually apply for the AGPL. But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition.

So far this contagion concern hasn't actually played out, and big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros - and nothing thus far has been compelled to be open sourced that isn't AGPL software.

This might be insightful about the concerns as well as why lawyers still think it's straightforward: https://www.opencoreventures.com/blog/agpl-license-is-a-non-...

https://discuss.logseq.com/t/on-the-agpl-license-and-the-ide...

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL

(not a lawyer): https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

> But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition.

Oh yeah, I have encountered this argument before, indeed. Thanks for the pointers btw. I do agree with Drew (your last link) here. I think it's part of the FUD from Google & Co I mentioned in my first comment in this thread. To me, it's even an evidence that the AGPL actually works as intended: it's not convenient for the Big Tech companies who can't reuse the AGPL without having to release their code that's targeted to end users, which they don't want to do.

> big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros

Do you have specific software in mind? What's AGPL in a common Linux distro? I'm asking because this surprises me. AGPL isn't usually used for something that's not a internet service, I wouldn't expect to find it in Linux distros' basic blocks.

Is Amazon Linux a common Linux distro? If so, it's often distributed with AGPL licensed code, I can think of a few pieces of software it has that are AGPL. They haven't been able to do internal forks of Ghostscript, if they were ever to do so, because of AGPL.

Debian is also the other more common one distros with AGPL software included with it.

Other things like forks of BerkleyDB by hyperscalers have all ended up as FOSS because of AGPL. Presumably this is a better example of where non-AGPL code would have not actually seen the light of day.

AGPL isn't viral or contagious, it's copyleft. You need permission from the author to copy. If you violate the license terms you're copying something you're not allowed to copy. That's a copyright violation like illegally downloading music and the rights holder is allowed to tell you to stop doing it.

>AGPL isn't viral or contagious, it's copyleft

Oh I agree! And I think it's straightforward to comply with.

I was just explaining the common legal concerns that pop up with the license, and that too much 'contagion' has historically been a gripe about its lack of case law.

> contagious license

Can I catch GPL inadvertently and against my will? No, it is not "contagious".

Sorry, I'll put that in air quotes, I don't believe free software is disease causing :) just speaking about the common concern is whether or not AGPL copyleft applies to everything involved in responding to a network request (it does not).

FSL is a much simpler court case. “You weren’t allowed to compete with us. You did. Here are the actual damages incurred. Pay us.”

An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.

The potentially overreaching nature of AGPL is one reason it maybe unenforceable. On the other hand if courts lean towards the less viral interpretation Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.

>An AGPL enforcement would require the court to interpret its virality which is an open question before even deciding whether a violation occurred.

In US courts, the case law shows that the "virality" is not really an open question because of GPLv3 case law, and has never been interpreted that way. I'm not sure why you're commenting about this scenario when you're unaware that this has been actually tried in courts.

In fact, we saw that in infamous Neo4j AGPL case, actually. AGPL worked as intended and protected the AGPL software in a similar way to LGPL. The court went on to protect non-GPL compliant additions that Neo4j made as being considered contagious, even, going even further to protect the original licensee than intended with the original unmodified license.

So, just recapping, you've gone from stating that Amazon could firewall off AGPL because it has no case law, and after learning it does has its case law includes GPLv3 that it simply may not be 'viral' enough because that hasn't been tested in court, to now learning it has been tested in court and successfully enforced.

Not sure what you mean - ‘worked as intended’. The case is still going on in 9th circuit and has amicus briefs from SFC and FSF.

There will be case law after appeal - FSF seems too timid to sue Neo4j (which they could do) and save decades of work.

maybe I misunderstood what you were saying…

https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-submits-amicus-brief-in-neo4j-v...

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/jan/13/neo4j-amicus/

AGPL has little case law. The extent of virality added by the additional clauses is not clear.

My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.

If it isn’t, then they it doesn’t really hamper their business model at all.

>The extent of virality added by the additional clauses is not clear.

The Neo4J case was one piece of a longstanding part of GPLv3 caselaw where the virality is clear.

>My point is that it doesn’t matter. If it is “viral” to the extent some people are concerned about, Amazon can find ways to firewall it.

Just a recap of your responses so far:

So AGPL has no case law and might even be unenforceable, so therefore it you should use non-free source available licenses. Oh, it does have case law and hyperscalers have been forced to open source their forks like of BDB?

Well, the virality hasn't been tested and FSL would be an easier case. Oh, it has been tested, multiple times and licensees have had to work out an agreement like in the Neo4j case - such that judges would actually be able to rely on prior art unlike FSL?

Okay, well, even if that's all true - Amazon could just firewall it anyways. How? Well they would simply use vast resources to create proprietary hardware, create a fork for proprietary hardware despite that making it impossible to receive patches from the main fork, and then sell that as a service.

Based on the above, I think you've done what you can to convince me.

> Google could get around these issues by modding an AGPL project to run on their proprietary hardware that no one has access to and then simply releasing the modified source code.

Well I guess they could today, I don't see the AGPL preventing them to. As long as the modified source is available under the AGPL I suppose they'd be good to go.

A license that forces someone to release software for specific hardware would be non-free I suppose.

I don't see this being practical though. Running proprietary hardware just for this reason would likely be costly, and not really efficient: someone could restore support for general hardware from upstream / only keep the interesting changes.

The original open source was a programmer to programmer relationship, not company to company. Open source as a business model was inveted later, and it turns out compatibility with original open source licenses only goes that far.

It’s kind of facile to imagine a conspiracy actively working to “convince” people to do the wrong thing. I’ve never seen any evidence of such a thing.

In reality, I think it’s an emergent property of software development, where very few people can make a living using the platonic ideal of a free license. People start projects that are free, then see that they can’t pay the rent, while users (including companies) keep asking for more support and more feature work (for free, naturally).

So the projects evolve, and get closer to business, both to attract contributions from developers who are paid (by big business) and to position project owners to actually make some money.

I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, or if we even need to make such a judgment, but I think the phenomenon is easily explained without resorting to some kind of shadow campaign on behalf of business.

There are 2 different "PR" campaigns that happened.

The first is Open Source vs Free Software. There's nothing shadowy about it. It's right there in the open. You can see who finances OSI. You can read what have to say about making Open Source business friendly and branding a new term vs "Free Software".

And you can see how shortly after they started promoting the term it took off in popularity. They didn't invent the term, but they definitely popularized it.

The 2nd PR campaign is OSI convincing devs that only software that only software that uses an official blessed license is pure.

> while users (including companies) keep asking for more support and more feature work (for free, naturally).

Then don't actually do that or offer to implement/support them in exchange for money?

There are always assholes (expecting free work), but you can just ignore them.

This is an anti-free-software narrative that is not supported by available evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

Freedom 0 is important. It's not some big tech conspiracy.

Freedom 0 was added after the definition I’m talking about.

I think freedom for the end user to use the software for any purpose is much more in keeping with the original spirit.

You're 100% right.

Side note: Stallman was right all along, before everybody else, in 1985.

What is the point of this comment? Free Software is the best of course. Open Source can be relicensed into Free Software, or relicensed into anything, as long as you keep the attribution or whatever little consideration they ask. So although Open Source is a corporate tool, at least the current snapshot is still equal to the best.

This is below Open Source. And it's claiming to be Open Source. You've made the case of why Open Source is a lowered standard, but you seem to be doing it to defend an even lower standard.

This is like defending an Open Source product calling itself "Free Software." It doesn't make any sense. People can release under any license they want, they wrote the software. The problem is lying about it.

5. They astroturfed permissive licenses

Truly one of the biggest wealth transfers in history. From well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...

> Why I (A/L)GPL

> Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you.

> If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.

> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.

> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

> To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation.

> You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid.

> They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run.

Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. Nothing else makes sense.

If AGPLv3 was slapped onto everything back then, the likelihood of linux/open source being where it is today would be an order of magnitude less. A good chunk of the original windows TCP/IP stack was ripped from BSD licensed code. Had that not have been "easy" for Microsoft to take, the internet may not have developed the way it did and we'd all maybe be on proprietary networks like AOL/MSN/etc.

The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction.

That being said, commercially supported OS software has essentially become shareware - just enough to get you hooked, and then the price jump is enormous.

> The solution isn't always swinging super-far in the other direction.

I'm not convinced. Compromise is the root of all evil. It allows self-contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas to exist.

I make a conscious effort to develop my morality by eliminating contradictory ideas and forming self-consistent world views. If the conclusions are extreme, then so be it. I accept the consequences.

That sounds lovely, actually.

Before Microsoft added TCP/IP to Windows, there were third party ports of the BSD TCP/IP stack to Windows. The winner ended up being Trumpet Winsock, until Microsoft wisely used the same winsock API for their own implementation and embraced and extinguished.

Those ports would still have occurred even if the BSD TCP/IP stack was GPL'd.

The alternative history here would not have been that Wrumpet Winsock didn't get crushed by MS but that MS used another more proprietary technology to do it. They have done it in many other areas, e.g. DirectX vs. OpenGL. You cannot hope to compete against the platform you build your product on.

IIRC, Microsoft wrapped a good chunk of the BSD code with it's native implementation of the Winsock API (I may be misremembering and the BSD code may have only been in the NT or win32 code - it's been decades and I'm pretty sure the whole stack has been rewritten since).

But if there wasn't a bunch of people pushing various implementations based on a permissive licence, it may not have been clear that the demand was there. Winsock (the API) heavily leveraged BSD sockets in its implementation, too. V1 was for all intents and purposes designed to deal with unifying their BSD implementations that had problematic issues because Windows didn't have a lot of the system calls that UNIX/POSIX did (though POSIX was available later on in NT) and allowing inter compatibility. It's not clear that Peter Tattam would have written Trumpet if the API wasn't already published, which was driven by the BSD code.

Also, Trumpet was not free or open source. It was notoriously pirated and illegally distributed.

Some history is here: https://windows-pride.fandom.com/wiki/WinSock#Background

Special booster: New product liability in EU for software. If your software is in any way related to commercial activity (eg. consulting or having been created as part of paid work), yproduct liability kicks in.

Best but not 100% secure way to protect yourself is to donate the software to a well meaning non profit. If you control the non-profit, the barrier might not hold, if you don't control it, it's not your software anymore.

Update: Thinking of it: AGPL might at least offer some protection as many integrators shy away from using software with this license.

I agree to some extend but not in all cases: there can be other motivations that mean it makes sense to use a more liberal license.

One example is code that deals with data formats. It's better to have a liberally used license here that can be adopted by corporations without giving anything back if the alternative risks those corporations adopting and popularizing proprietary formats instead.

The AGPL is a nonfree license that violates freedom 0. It's a EULA posing as a copyright license. It's nonsensical.

https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/

I use to feel the same way, but I’ve relented. The end-end-users — the people actually interacting with the software — retain the right to keep accessing its source so they can modify it. That fills an important gap, where vendors can modify other-licensed software, let me use it, but prevent me from accessing the changes they made to it.

Developers and corporations don't really matter. Trading their freedoms for ours is completely fine. We, the users, are the ones who matter. It's all about us. No, the developer cannot tivoize the software, because that harms us. No, the developer can't isolate it in a server, because that harms us. They should probably be glad Stallman is in charge... My definition of "harms us" is far more expansive and extreme than his.

And if the corporations don't like it, why don't they just... buy the developers out like the good capitalists they are? They want the software so badly? Contact the guys who wrote it and and get down to business. Make them millionaires and I'm sure they'll have no issues giving them special permission to violate the AGPLv3. They are the copyright holders, they can do whatever they want. I even emailed Stallman to confirm that he thinks it's an ethical practice, and he does. The emails are literally recorded in the commit messages, just get in contact and talk business.

If they won't do that, then let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own full time developers to write their own version. I'm sure their lawyers will also advise them not to even read our free software source code since it can taint the final product. Works for me. If they won't contribute back on our terms, if they won't pay us, then they should get literally nothing. That's leverage.

The article you linked is not convincing at all. Who said we're "gifting away" our free software? We're not. We're publishing it so that fellow hackers can enjoy it freely. People who are like us. I for one don't really want corporations taking advantage of this generosity at our expense. Either they become one of us, or they pay for it, or they leave empty handed.

People really need to stop feeling sorry for trillion dollar corporations. Won't you think of the poor billionaires with nothing to their names? Give me a break. I care a lot about individual hackers who code for a higher purpose. These are the people I want to help. You'd have to pay me big bucks to spare even one second of thought towards some billionaire technofeudalist organization.

I still remember everyone talking about how Android was so much better because it was "open source". And for a while, that was true. Now it's just a free gateway into having your freedom has a user taken from you, because no one ever bothered to make Android an actual FLOSS community like Linux and many programming languages are.

You need to have an actual ethos behind these things. You need to have an actual foundation organization behind these things like the PSF, FSF, or Linux foundation that drives the development, not corporate overlords who have a profit motive.

The people involved need to understand that they're not going to create untold amounts of value that can be measured monetarily. At best you might get hired as a fellow for a while and get to draw some money from donations. Linus only got rich because some very generous people offered him shares after they built a company on his project.

I think (free / libre) Android is still alive today (although it is endangered now with Google not yet having released Android 16 QPR1. I would still hope with enough contributors we could fork it). Forks like LineageOS/GrapheneOS exist, which further improve allow you to use Android completely without proprietary Google Spyware. There is also a quite big ecosystem of free open source apps (on FDroid and other repos)

The problem isn't that there's no free/libre Android, it's that it's not the core ethos.

15-20 years ago, someone at Google thought, "Jeeze, these little smartphones are great, but they could be better, and imagine all of the data we could get off of users if they did everything in their lives with one?", so they bought into Android, which was a completely independent startup until 2005. That is the platform's raison d'être. They wanted to compete with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and later iPhoneOS, for the data that people were entering into smartphones, so they introduced a software product that was open source so that OEMs would buy in. And it worked.

Android would not have had a use to Google as a GNU/Linux-style project where there is no gatekeeper. If I can easily tear out Google's proprietary software, and replace it with something else without losing access to things like the Play Store, then Google just lost out on the value proposition on their purchase of Android in 2005 when it came to my use of it. They did it to make money off of my use, not to graciously support a FLOSS project.

And now we're seeing that playing out as all of the FLOSS projects you mention are under direct threat from Google's handling of the project.

This seems like a straw man argument

"Everyone who disagrees with this is a large freeloading corporation"

You seem to imply it is a negative, I don't think it is.

1. They certainly came from the free software movement, but they don't call it "free software", they call it "open source". It is a detail but the name acknowledge the distinction, "open source" is a more practical term while "free software" is more idealistic. And I think it is a good thing we have both a business friendly OSI for getting stuff done and a more militant FSF to keep businesses in check.

2. I never needed this convincing so I may be biased, but open source is I believe superior to proprietary. Think of the source code as documentation, the best kind because it tells the truth. Think of the ability to change and rebuild the software as unlimited extra settings you get for free.

3. Their definition of open source is as much canon as the definition of free software by the FSF is canon.

4. Most developers aren't lawyers, we can't really trust them to pick licenses, or worse, write licences that will do what they think will do. So having an approved list of well tested license is a good thing.

That big tech and big money is behind it is not a bad thing. Developers want to get paid after all. Big tech have the best lawyers too, so by picking a licence they acknowledge, you know what you are up to.

And note that some of the OSI approved licenses, like AGPL are particularly hated by big tech.

I'm going to vote you up, because at least your points make sense.

The key problem with your argument unfortunately is this part.

>> they don't call it "free software", they call it "open source"

The problem with this is that "Open Source" is already a phrase with meaning. Trying to co-opt that term for marketing reasons is disingenuous.

I happen to think that a source-available license is better than a closed source license. I ship my own code that way. However what I create is not Open Source, and I don't market it as such.

Liquibase is using a known term to market their product, when their license is not compatible with that term.

Their license is absolutely fine. Trying to pass ot off as OSS is not.

"While corporations were once opposed to this model of software licensing, fearing the reduction of the Exchange-Value of their own products as a side effect of its widespread adoption, they ultimately realized that this software licensing model represented another socialized model of production which could be privately appropriated."

Or you know, like, the 4 freedoms matter?

This was the original 1986 definition of “free software”.

‘The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.’

Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.

I don't know, they were focused on freedom for users not for vendors/programmers.

I think it's very intentional that a restriction on what you can do with software -- including reselling it -- is a violation of the "four freedoms" -- freedoms for what someone can do with software, including redistribute it or use it for any purpose they want (including reselling it).

These licenses meant to prohibit users from using the software in ways that harm the business interests of the programmers -- I am confident the original creators of free software four freedoms would agree they are not free software. It is very intentional that they were saying the freedom of users to do what they want with software should not be limited for the convenience of the business interests of those who wrote the software.

The 4 freedoms came later. The above definition predates them. There’s nothing in that definition that makes me think anyone was thinking of anything beyond community created software, distributed by the community.

This license isn’t about users. If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.

This license in particular isn’t my favorite, but I’m totally fine in theory with licenses that attempt to patch loopholes exploited by bad actors.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

That was written in a world where “selling software” meant charging people money for Software that ran in their computers, like the famous example of Stallman mailing tapes with Emacs tarballs.

The whole thing was thought up when residential internet couldn’t be used for much more than email, BBS and Usenet, and it wasn’t viable to use it for downloading a text editor.

It’s not a timeless set of principles to live by forever after, proprietary software —that’s not charged for- dominates everyone’s lives more than ever in the public and private sphere, precisely from companies that benefited from the open source ecosystem of software engineering tools.

The 1985 GNU Manifesto explicitly brings up the possibility of third-party companies whose sole business is charging for setting up, running, and managing free software:

> Meanwhile, the users who know nothing about computers need handholding: doing things for them which they could easily do themselves but don't know how.

> Such services could be provided by companies that sell just handholding and repair service. If it is true that users would rather spend money and get a product with service, they will also be willing to buy the service having got the product free. The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one. Meanwhile, those of us who don't need the service should be able to use the program without paying for the service.

That's not quite true. They didn't imagine that 3rd parties would be "running" the software. In the scenarios above the end user is running the software on their computers. They always have access to the source code and there's no vendor lock-in.

"The service companies will compete in quality and price; users will not be tied to any particular one."

> If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.

In the Free Software community, this line was always blurry, almost non-existent even.

Even if the receiver of the Free Software package is not a programmer by any definition, at worst case, they can ask for a friend to patch something up, and if another friend wanted his patched version, the modified source code has to move with the software package.

Open Source software can block even this simple pathway by not giving back the modified source from friend to the user, creating a dependency. It'd be heartless to do this between two friends, but companies will happily do that.

My most vivid example of this is SDKs for hardware. Half of the API is open, but the patched version of the (open source) libraries cost $2K+, several NDAs and allegiance to company for the rest of your life or you can be sent to a concentration camp operated by an alliance of companies doing the same thing.

...and this is just for a small biometric scanner you happen to find in a piece of 10 year old discarded tech.

> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.

That's not a bug, that's a feature. Freedom 0 applies to everyone.

Giving a gift does not confer an obligation, and "contributing back" is meaningless in this context. Someone using a gift you gave them to run a business does not harm you in any way whatsoever.

If it was merely about “giving a gift” with no obligations or restrictions there should be no open source licenses. Everything would just be released into the public domain.

Free software has never been about giving gifts with no obligations.

Public domain is indeed an open source “license”. It’s what I release all of my code under (via the WTFPL).

This is implying that free software is a 'gift'.

It's not, it is an exchange.

You gain the ability to use the library or program in exchange for releasing your changes and modifications.

Well, unless it's MIT licensed, in which case you're kind of a sucker and it all but _is_ a gift to Big Tech.

Copyleft is not congruent and coterminous with free software.

There is plenty of FOSS that is not copyleft.

The conglomerates can also host it on their extensive cloud infra at a price small competitors will never be able to match because they own the cloud infrastructure too.

Somehow the service+infra is the same cost or cheaper then buying the infra alone and trying to deploy the open source version to it.

"First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you" I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose. So, even under this definition it is not free or open source.

The GNU Project and Richard Stallman, who made this statement, would agree that it's not free under even this earliest definition. They in-fact made it even clearer when they defined freedom of "use" as the distinct 0th freedom eventually to make it even clearer that being able to use the software freely is fundamental to their idea of freedom. Again, freedom isn't about price, it's about usage, availability, redistribution and lack of restrictions on this. I cannot freely redistribute FSL licensed code under the original definition of free software.

"Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then."

Yes, the GNU project were acutely aware of this and designed the GPL licenses around such scenarios - they just didn't design it for SaaS businesses, where if you redistribute the built program externally after modifying it but only distributed its responses over a network, you technically weren't obligated to open source that modification. AGPL resolved this issue, and has more case law behind it than this 2 year old license, and has certainly less daunting implications than a not legally well defined 'competing purpose'.

Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with whether or not Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, and the license was made by lawyers to clearly provide protection. Did you create this legal theory yourself? Because I've not seen any writing from a lawyer on the internet that suggests that Amazon could firewall themselves off in a friendly jurisdiction under any reading of the license, and I read a lot of AGPL lawyerblogging.

Sentry, the company who created FSL, even states that this license restricts user freedom explicitly - for the sake of the business interests of the original developer.

So summing up.. Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GNU Project, the OSI, the creators of the FSL, the company now currently using FSL, all agree that this source available license does not meet the definition of "free software". So, whose definition are we using out of thin air?

>I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose.

You’re free to distribute it to your neighbors for free for any purpose. You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one. You just can’t commercialize it as a competing product.

“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.

This isn’t my favorite license, but it provides a lot more freedoms than merely looking at the source code.

With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.

>You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one.

So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?

>“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.

No, the source is available to read and the software is not free based on the historical definitions you're providing, unfortunately. Happy to understand from a different lens, but Stallman specifically meant freedom in the way even FSL writers agreed with.

Also, please refrain to using commonly used terms in the common way as 'disingenuous', it doesn't lead to interesting discussion and is how these threads end up needing to be patrolled by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.

So, this is a personal non-legal theory that does not have a basis in jurisprudence, then? GPLv3 is proven as enforceable, and is what AGPL is based on. No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control". That's just not how copyright or licensing contracts work. You may want to disclaim conjectures like this with IANAL..

My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.

My entire point is how big tech has captured the zeitgeist, so the common use of that term is irrelevant.

>No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control".

You are 100% incorrect. Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.

>So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?

The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.

>My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles and hey espouse sound dirty.

It's not dirty, it just doesn't follow the principles the rest of us espouse. We're interested in software that follows these principles via a license like this.

That you're ascribing malice to the entire FOSS community seems a bit strange, when they're the ones who created the free software definition in the first place. The source is available but is not free software even in the original definition.

>Contracts are frequently found unenforceable for this exact reason.

So, personal theory, wrt AGPL. Given you've recently been made aware of the stack of case law for AGPL and that it is largely _just_ GPLv3, I wonder why you think this is a possibility given it is your uninformed non-expert opinion.

>The original definition says nothing about a fee or what restrictions may be in place.

Completely out of context, because even the original definition defines it as "free speech" as in that there are no restrictions on the ways you can freely using it anyway you want, including distributing it.

You're right that a business might offer a fee for free software under this definition, but that's unrelated to it being free to distribute under any clauses.

Given that Stallman is alive and we don't have to do dubious Stallman legal textualism to justify source available licenses, when even source available license writers and users are fine with that distinction, seems a bit strange.

> My entire point is that “Source available” is a term frequently used in a derogatory way to make software that doesn’t follow the principles

I agree it doesn't need to be called "source available"; it's just proprietary software.

I try to remember this and remind to others while chatting:

    - Open Source software is about developer freedom.
    - Free Software is about user freedom.

I'm for the latter, strongly.

> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.

this is absolutely right, and the OSI has been successfully captured by these companies

would RedHat be able survive to IPO these days? I very much doubt it (see: Oracle Linux)

a new term is needed, "Open Source" is no longer fit for purpose in a world where the hyperscalers exist

"Fair Source"?

Exactly right. These updated licenses are mostly to stop massively profitable hyperscalers using their work for free. For the average joe, or regular company it makes no difference.

There are actually open source copyleft licenses (such as GPL, AGPL) that force "massive profitable hyperscalers" to contribute their improvements back.

But not any money.

Yes, trying to retain a monopoly over use of the software is inherently incompatible with the idea behind free software.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft must be grateful for all these developers defending them against massive companies like Liquibase.

Spot on. Thank you for saying this. It boggles my mind with a bunch of former Red Hat types now work for companies like Microsoft and perpetuate a zealot mindset that might have made sense in the 90s but now it's completely divorced from what the next generation of software companies need.

All you have to do is look at the name of the company on the building ...it still says Microsoft folks

You might not have noticed but Microsoft has moving heavily into the open source world. Mind you, they're still a for profit company and you and I might not like everything they do to make their profit but they're a long way away from hating on open source.

"Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source

Microsoft has subverted projects like CPython by hiring mediocre core developers who have built out their power over the years. Microsoft has coerced other projects to move to GitHub so they could steal and launder the copyright in their LLMs. Multiple Microsoft GitHub CEOs have mocked open source and resistance to the code laundering.

Microsoft "open" source projects like VSCode exist to lock in developers, surveil developers and steal their IP. Developers should become dependent on GitHub, Copilot and stolen code until the open source ecosystem can finally be destroyed.

The entire thing is a big EEE that is beginning to pay off because of LLMs (we can still resist by moving off GitHub and rejecting LLM code theft).

I use liquibase at work because there was a large marketing campaign saying this was the standard for db schema versioning in the java world. Now that I look at flyway, it seems to be a tiny bit better... I had mixed results with liquibase, if you don't use the xml changeSets you are in for a ride and its not that easy to do a simple diff on two databases. It kinda works but feels iffy...

During my frustrations I read blogposts saying you can implement schema version changes easily by yourself and I kind of see it... You have to do the thinking by yourself anyway when you declare changeSets?

> if you don't use the xml changeSets

I find it crazier that people use xml changesets.

My setup is to use sql files versioned by date. Each file has changsets (regions demarcated by comments) for single transaction actions (like creating a database), along with it's rollback actions written as comments in it's respective changeset.

I don't trust rollbacks, I mostly use them for dev purposes for scripts that are wip. If i have to "undo" changes to a db, better to write specific scripts that revert the actions (i.e. manually move columns around to a tmp table).

I essentially just use liquibase as a language-agnostic db-migration tool that can connect ot a db and run a series of sql files. I could write scripts for that, but it's nice to have a third-party solution.

I haven't used it for 15 years, but this is exactly what I used to do. I felt like using SQL helped me understand what was actually happening to the database and having a tool that automatically did the right thing for applying those snippets between versions was great.

For example, think of one install going from 1.0.0 > 1.0.2 while another is going from 1.0.0 > 1.1.0. Sure, you could write something to do that yourself, but I'd rather use an existing library that already covers tons of edge cases.

The number of Docker containers I've used that need to be rolled through a special incantation of several versions to get things upgraded cleanly make me shake my head sometimes. Every time I have to do that I still think of Liquibase and wish that I could just grab the most recent version and have the database schema magically updated like I could do with Java apps 2 decades ago.

cfgbvcsbmn

Be careful, or you could end up in the same situation with Flyway. I'm not sure how many contributors are employed or paid by Redgate Software. But what's to stop them from doing the same to Flyway once their competitor has made this change to Liquibase?

Everyone I know switched to Flyway.

One thing that Liquibase does better than Flyway is supporting multiple different database systems with the same migrations by abstracting the changes instead of relying on raw SQL statements such as Flyway.

Liquibase and Flyway are the only major frameworks on the JVM which could be embedded into a JVM application to get rid of a sidecar or a startup process which has to run before the actual application could start.

> abstracting the changes instead of relying on raw SQL statements such as Flyway.

That's exactly why Liquibase turned source-available. These abstractions are leaky, error-prone and are better maintained via the money from support contracts.

"Make problem, they earn money fixing them" is a reasonable modus operandi.

If the previous code is on GitHub, then the previous code is open source. All future development will be under fsl. And released two years later.

I think from the get go the should have planned their enterprise vs open source a bit better and it would have worked out

I really like Sqitch these days.

Thanks for the discovery, i did not know of this one. From the docs, it look like promising to me.

The timeline problem:

You wrote it at time T

Therefore from T to T+70years, you control it

Anyone who writes the same thing at T+1 is "copying"

But if we both arrive at the same solution independently, causality matters more than chronology. If your code didn't cause mine, why should your timestamp give you power over me?

This breaks the whole edifice:

If independent discovery isn't "theft," then copyright only makes sense for literal verbatim copying. And even then - if I retype your code character-by-character because it's the best solution, am I stealing or just recognizing truth?

Copyright law and patent law are two entirely different things and handle conflicts entirely differently. Lumping them both together is legally nonsensical.

anyone thought about forking? :)

https://hachyderm.io/@joschi/115378071393408064 https://bsky.app/profile/joschi.xyz/post/3m3a76o6nkc2c

Is opensource synonym of free?

If you mean free as in "free software", not really.

1. The philosophy is completely different: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

2. Technically, mostly but not quite; there are technical differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604258

If you mean free as in gratis: nope, you can sell open source software, there are several possible business models around this.

I agree that this isn't technically "open source", but the FSL blocks competing use. Is anyone here actually blocked from using Liquibase because of their switch to the FSL?

TYL that Open Source ≠ Free Software.

The only "free" software license is MIT.

We can talk about Stallman's "vision", but frankly he's a commie who wants to dictate usage rights for others.

Free as in speech not as in beer. I read as total freedom. Not freedom to do what I think you should.

Whatever Stallman’s vision was - It seems he didn’t care enough to fight for it when sh@# hit the fan with Neo4j. If you don’t know what I am talking about check out link below.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/adverse_appeals_court...

Maybe Pocketbase as an alternative?

The only thing those have in common is the word `base` in their names.

I would imagine Flyway would be the most robust alternative

I don't like any of these licenses, but if I was playing devil's advocate here, "open source" as a term on its own surely just implies the source code is publicly available? Which it is.

I believe that it's not a protected term or a trademark or anything, but rather it's the case of misleading marketing. Open source is widely understood to be a specific thing, which Liquibase explicitly isn't.

Although, on the other hand, "Two years after release, the license for each applicable version of Liquibase Community code reverts to Apache 2.0". So, it's like... eventually open source. Which is still misleading, as it doesn't apply to the current versions.

> Open source is widely understood to be a specific thing

I think everyone thinks the way they understand open source is the way everyone understands open source. And yet every time an open source project, by any definition, changes their license, people debate what open source really means.

Unlike a term born with a specific definition, like "FOSS", open source doesn't really have a definition. The OSI has a definition that seems to be most popular, but that's not the only understanding of the term that is doing the rounds.

For plenty of people, open source means "source-available software". For others, it's software licensed under a subset of specific licenses (which licenses is also a subject for debate). And for some it means "software developed in a specific way that involves the community", like many Linux adjacent projects are, disqualifying corporate projects licensed under those specific licenses because they can do a Liquibase any time they want and there's very little chance a community large enough to maintain and develop the existing code will stand up when they do.

Liquibase now falls under one of the three definitions I've heard people agree about rather than two.

I guess you're right, in the way that we can either describe and prescribe language, and yes, open source is not defined in exact terms. I still do think that attaching the label to a product, and disregarding the decades long collaborative nature of the development is utter nonsense. In my opinion, the onus is on these people to get closer to what open source really is, not because I don't want to update the term, but because I want the movement to succeed, and not to be watered down.

Funnily enough, the Liquibase project agrees with this sentiment too (or wants to avoid the fallout from open source gatekeepers): https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/pull/7380

"Open source" was a widely used term in several industries before it was ever used for software. The original meaning was simply "publicly available". It was OSI that attempted to co-opt the term to mean something more specific.

IT is like that in every aspect of its naming, I think. It's a separate domain. We got architects, rockstars, viruses, windows, icons, etc and they resemble the original thing only to a degree.

Sorry, I stand corrected quoting from the OSD: "Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code".

The OSD is just some people's opinion. They hold no legal or official weight.

It's like me starting the cheese initiative and trying to control what others call cheese, a job that's typically reserved for governments.

Not just some people. It's more like if the Cheese Association of France came up with a definition, and that definition then gets accepted by cheese lovers and major dairy industry companies worldwide. The OSD holds significant weight in the industry.

No government has endorsed the OSI or has protected the name open source. Unlike, for example, the word Gouda.

The OSI are the people who made it up, and the only reason why anybody cares about it. If you call yourself Open Source and you don't comply with the OSI definition, you're a parasite trying to commit fraud with the good will generated by other people.

I also don't care if somebody in 1975 said "I like to be open, and I'll let anyone look at the source." Old McDonald had a farm before McDonald's was a restaurant, but that doesn't mean that if you open a restaurant called McDonald's that is decorated like a McDonald's, you're not a scammer. I know your plastic fruit is carbon-based, but if you label it as "organic" you're a thief.

If you're not trying to scam people, be creative and make up your own catchphrase for letting people look at your source code - or don't even, because the whole idea of having a branding for allowing people access (and rights to) the source is imitation of the FSF and OSI.

I'm ok with saying that Open Source is now widely understood to mean what the OSI says, that's just a function of how language evolves. But we don't need to re-write history to get there.

Open Source isn't a brand, it isn't a trademark, it was hijacked by OSI to enforce their specific interpretation of a phrase that was already in use. OSI wasn't founded until 1998, over a decade after the term open source software became popular and was used throughout the unix and linux communities and in businesses such as Caldera. Before OSI came up with the OSD many creators of open source software had non-compete clauses in the licence.

"Open Source software" was never a popular term before the OSI promoted it. "Open Source software" is a reworking of the original term "Free software" to be more palatable to businesses. The Open Source Definition is very similar to the older Free Software Definition and virtually all software qualifies as either both or neither.

Likewise I feel like it only became "the common understanding" due to pushing within the past decade. Before that "the common understanding" was what people are only now calling "source available" - which I don't think I'd heard of before just a couple years ago.

They're in no way, shape, or form official and they didn't come up with the term open source.

Like I said above, they're as official as the cheese initiative I just made up.

No government has endorsed them, and open source is not a protected name in any country I am aware of.

They're just some arrogant American organisation that expects the entire world to bend to their whim, as usual.

Many countries have false advertisement laws, so if you say something is open source, it does mean various things. So, if you sell the product for free, then of that free product the source has to be practically available.

No, "Open source" had been used as a term for many decades before the February 3rd, 1998 meeting where Christine Peterson suggested that it be borrowed to describe software. This is much of the reason why any attempts to trademark the phrase have been denied.

OSI was financed by Tim O’Reilly originally and now by big tech companies as a way to co-opt th free software movement and make it more business friendly.

They have successfully convinced a generation of developers that “Open Source” is pure and holy, but a licensee that includes a term that says something like no company making more than $100 million per year can use this software for free is unclean and maybe even evil.

They don’t want alternative licenses to exist because it hurts their bottom line.

I might disagree with meaning of "free software" in common parlance. But "open source" is pretty much agreed on. Source available is as valid and much more descriptive when well source is or can be provided to users.

https://opensource.org/osd

Pretty much everyone I know switched to Firebase.

Paying a license and playing by the rules of a myriad licenses is a chore even for those who can afford it.

I supposed you misread - both tools are completely different.

Mistyped. Of course I meant Flyway. Funny how the LLM in the brain hallucinated )

Liquibase and Firebase has absolutely nothing in common. Liquibase is a database migration tool...

The comments here are pretty surprising. a lot of commenters are very worried about something that seems like a very reasonable change. The license change is to prevent someone like AWS offering managed-liquibase. It might not be technically open source anymore but why does that matter? You can still read/fork/contribute to the source and leverage liquibase internally. The fact that liquibase the company exists and provides this library is great. They shouldn't have to live in fear of their hard work being co-opted into managed liquibase to pass some open source purity test.

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