Hacker News Reader

Comment by MidnightRider39 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the most cynical take on OSS possible.

Like anything good you do an evil person could benefit from - is the solution to never do any good?

The solution is to use AGPLv3.

I’m maybe daft but AGPLv3 doesnt prevent $Evilcorp from using it, they just need to share any modifications or forks they made?

Only if they provide the software or software as a service. Then I suspect it's good enough if the modifications or forks made are shared internally if software is used only internally, but on the other hand I'm not a lawyer.

> if software is used only internally

Internal users are still users tho. They are entitled to see source code and license allows them to share it with the rest if of the world.

Employers might argue that such internal use and distribution would fall under the “exclusively under your behalf” clause in the GPLv3, which is inherited by the AGPLv3.

Oh, I guess it would. Ignore me.

This is the point. They can use and modify it, but they also have to share their modifications, i.e., help its development. Yet most megacorps never even touch this license.

And at this point, it appears running code through an LLM to translate it eliminates copyright (and thus the licence), so $Anycorp can use it.

Our stuff is AGPL3 licenced and if this present trend continues we might just switch to MIT so at least the little guys can take advantage of it the way the big guys can.

I think the whitewashing of code through LLMs is still unproven if it actually works for a reasonably complex project and also it’s still kind of legal Wild West - I think no one knows for sure how it will work out.

There are piles of examples of it working for complex projects and libraries now especially if they have good test suites your clone can pass.

Also they are even getting quite good at reverse engineering binaries.

Anything not released as FOSS, will have a FOSS copy made.

There is no moat and the reign of restrictive licenses on software is effectively over.

Can you share any of these examples? I haven’t been able to find any…

In reality most $Evilcorp have policies against AGPLv3, which is why projects can make moneh selling a less-restricted enterprise license for the same code.

I often hear this but I don’t really understand it. Not saying you need to explain it to me but what is the issue with AGPLv3 that turns those corporations away?

To my non-lawyer eyes it looks like MIT or Apache2 but modifications need to be made public as well.

If you don’t make any modifications then it should be fine? Or do most $Evilcorp aim to make modifications? Or is AGPLv3 something like garlic against vampires (doesn’t make sense but seems to work)?

AGPLv3 includes that “distribution” includes essentially communicating with the service over the network, as opposed to the GPL concept of like, sending a shrink wrapped binary that someone downloads and runs themselves.

So basically they are worried that they have no way of avoiding one or more of their tens of thousands of engineers “distributing” it to customers by including it in some sort of publicly accessible service. AFAIK there’s no settled case regarding what level of network communication qualifies - like if I run a CRUD app on Postgres and Postgres was AGPL, am I distributing Postgres?

Now the second part is that you only have to give out your changes to the AGPL software to those that it was “distributed” to. Most people aren’t changing it! If anything they’re just running a control plane in front of it…

but it goes back to the corporate legal perspective of “better safe than sorry” - we can’t guarantee that one of our engineers, isn’t changing it in some way that would expose company internals, then triggering a condition where they have to distribute those private changes publicly.

Oh I see that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com