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Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.

They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.

The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers, etc.

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The GPL3 can be put behind a server and no one will ever see the source code because there is never any distribution.

Only the AGPL is remotely close to forcing hyper-scalars to release the source code of what they provide.

I know this is true of AGPL, but GPL3? I thought the people who objected to GPL3 were those distributing software to their users (e.g. was a reason Apple switched from bash to zsh). I cannot think of aything in GPL3 that would be a problem for hyper-scalers.

> They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.

Laws are only as good as their enforcement, in business at least. Unfortunately I have seen first hand that no one cares about licensing if they can’t get caught.

Businesses licenses are good because you can offer support and other benefits to encourage payment.

Hey, nothing wrong with closed source, BSL, etc. I am fine with it. I am the last person that will say someone should give out their work for free.

What I object to is companies releasing software with permissive licenses, and then getting butthurt that others profit from it, or trying to rug pull the permissive licenses after a community adopted and contributed to it.

If you want to play the OSS game, then play it right.

> Laws are only as good as their enforcement

The claim is that those licenses are deemed no-touch within those companies—it's the companies themselves that insist on the software and their business not mixing, e.g. Apple continuing to ship old versions of GNU programs like Bash and then eventually moving to zsh rather than provide updated versions that are GPLv3.

Neither GPLv3 nor AGPLv3 say anything about businesses not being able to use the software.

Or SSPL, which extends AGPL with even more sharing requirements.

The SSPL is not an open-source license.

> It's deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

From "The SSPL is Not an Open Source License" <https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...>

Yes it is. It plainly meets all the criteria in the definition iff AGPL meets them too.

The central difference is that SSPL discriminates against specific fields of endeavor, while the AGPL doesn't; see

* https://web.archive.org/web/20230411163802/https://lists.ope...

* https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Server_Side_Publi...

Which fields of endeavor? Does it say you can't use the software to run a nuclear power plant, or a military jet? Does it say you can't use it in a restaurant?

There are special restrictions if the software is conveyed over a network, but not for other usages, thus the SSPL discriminates against this use case.

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