> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem.
I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.
Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.
For bonus points make sure your fork has better SEO than the original, so when someone who heard it's permissive embeds it in a proprietary product, you can sue them.
Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.
There's nothing toxic in the AGPL for you as long as you don't want to make that code proprietary (even without making profits)
They just choose avoid agpl software. Their loss. Unfortunately they also spread FUD on this and many commenters here happily convey it.
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Same rights. Same freedoms only a little more opiniated delivery. Same business card. The only difference: when someone takes your code, tweakes it and builds a service on it, the tweaks, the improvements must come back.
I work at an open source company and we always avoided using APGL for many complex legal reasons - most of our user base would use something else if we were to switch license to APGL.
May they all heard too much FUD or are plain stupid but imo the reason is more complex
> because they are stupid and evil
Yes, that was the intended meaning (evil, not stupid - on the contrary, I think that's very clever). With this I'm not qualifying small companies that bought into the FUD, but big corps that don't like that they cannot just take AGPL code and make others scared of the AGPL for no good reasons.
In other words, not being a parasite is stressful.
Cruel world where I'm not allowed to just take, take, take
No, it isn't; a client talking to an AGPLv3 service over a network API stays a separate program and is not touched by the license at all. Section 13 places obligations solely on whoever runs a modified version of the service, while remote users, API clients included, only gain the right to receive that service's source. So nothing on the client side must suddenly become AGPLv3, and the only thing that ever has to be shared is the AGPL'd program itself, not anything across the API boundary. The first half of your post is basically unfounded FUD; the second half tracks.
It wasn't the only red flag in this case, but frustrating nonetheless.
And the reason it makes no sense is that by your logic, any tool that can consume some (e.g. HTTP-based REST) API would have to be open-sourced the moment I get it to fetch data from my AGPLv3 service. No offense meant at all, but that would simply be bizarro world, and there is enough precedent against it. If APIs did not act as clear boundaries, AGPLv3 software would indeed spread to everything it touches or traverses, like an epidemic. If yours or your customers' lawyers claim otherwise, you/they should get ones with an actual understanding of software and IP law.
I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.
I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
It’s fine to use these kind of tools, just don’t get too attached and be ready for the rug pull.
It's companies using your tool that don't want to give back to the people