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Comment by theanonymousone | Hacker News Reader

As a lay person, I still don't get what is AGPL missing that makes vendors "invent" so many new licenses and spawn so much debate? Why not just use AGPL, and if it's insufficient, invest in an AGPLv2 initiative?

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See https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up#b...

MongoDB invested sufficient resources in drafting an update to the AGPL. That license is called the Server Side Public License. Controversy ensued.

But SSPL was not approved by OSI. BY "investing" I mean getting it to the same status as AGPL :)

Are you suggesting that they should've bribed OSI, or.. ?

/s would be nice. But just in case, I was suggesting to work closely with OSI and do enough back and forth until a license is agreed upon.

If the intent is to stop it being used for a business, that's inherently at odds with part of the OSI's definition: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research".

Now technically maybe it could meet the OSD if it required a royalty for hosting the software as a SaaS product, instead of banning that - since it allows "free redistribution", and passes on the same right to anyone receiving it (it is defined in terms of prohibitions on what the licence can restrict, and there is no restriction on charging a set amount for use unless that requires executing a separate licence agreement).

Now arguably this is a deficiency in the OSD. But I imagine if you tried to exploit that, they might just update the definition and/or decline to list your licence.

Iirc the issue with SSPL was that releasing the entire stack under SSPL would basically be impossible, since you wouldn't have the rights to release, for example, the Linux kernel, under it.

Yes. I also read it somewhere that, for example, if you hosted your service on Microsoft IIS, SSPL required you to publish IIS source, regardless of the fact that you don't have it.

MinIO made their source AGPL, but then cloud providers hosted the service "as is" and make money off it, with MinIO team getting zip. That still complies with AGPL but is not monetarily beneficial to the MinIO team.

At least that's my understanding. They closed source completely, but a source-available license wouldn't have run into this issue.

It is not possible to create a license that would satisfy the Free Software Foundation's "four freedoms" while also solving the issues many of those vendors have with the AGPL. At the same time, the "source available" mindset doesn't have a steward organization like the FSF or OSI.

The major concern regarding the AGPL is that it only fosters code share when a code change is involved. The license has nothing to do with someone building a competitive service around your project.

If a Big Tech company happened to build a cloud service (SaaS) around your project without any code change, and that service is more competitive than the one you provide, there is not much you can do about it with the AGPL.

The AGPL is published by the FSF, with mainly community-led projects in mind. The profit and sustainability of a corporation is not their primary concern. (A minor correction: The most recent version is v3; any newer version would be v4, not v2.)

Source available isn't a license, it is the lack of a license. It's the legal default state for all art. It can include whatever made-up rules the author wants you to follow but your just as well off if you don't read them and just treat it as copyrighted.

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