Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

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The freedom to host open-source software is more important than contributing back to the original project: it's where the actual value of open source comes from. Would you host your website behind Apache or Nginx if you couldn't just switch providers and keep the same web server? Would you ever pick up Postgres or MySQL if you couldn't actually pay a company to host that for you, knowing that if they screwed up, you could switch to a provider that did it better?

From a pure engineering reliability perspective, coupling your technology choice to your vendor gives that vendor too much leverage (as we've seen with, for example, VMware).

This isn't about defending the big companies at all. It's about defending the right of hosting providers to compete on hosting a variety of software. In the alternative world of entirely commercial licenses, or entirely BUSL-styled licenses, you would be shackled to the specific vendors that happened to create the technology that you wanted to leverage. This is a scenario where the customer invariably loses.

> or entirely BUSL-styled licenses

Let's not get everything mixed up here - I singled out BUSL exactly because it does not prevent competing services, especially at small scale. In fact it would encourage small business and individual usage vs big cloud providers. It also has a conversion clause, so worst case scenario you have a slightly outdated MIT-licensed release to pick up from.

The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.

That said, indeed it might not be an ideal choice for that kind of cloud-hosted software if you want to maximize adoption.

> The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.

To support sibling comment: no it doesn't?

But your point about the revenue cut off in the BUSL is worthwhile (assuming we're talking about a licensor that is leveraging the additional use grant). I just disagree that it's a remedy because it basically punishes a business for being successful, by changing the rules upon which it was built. I'd be very curious to hear of anybody who has licensed software under the BUSL and has ended up getting a license from companies that meet those revenue thresholds.

It's worth noting that the BUSL, by default, with no additional use grant, prohibits the use of the software in production. So I actually think you have the two licenses reversed. The BUSL prohibits production use and competing services by default unless an additional use grant is specified and then it is only allowed under the revenue threshold specified in the additional use grant.

The AGPL has no prohibition whatsoever on the deployment of competing services.

It is expected that you use the license with an Additional Use Grant. For example, Hashicorp says:

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.

Or, for a revenue threshold:

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.

That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.

The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].

That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.

[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

I think we're agreeing, but you seem to be spinning things:

1. BUSL does not allow production use. Additional Use Grant (optional) is necessary to allow this, and is typcially accompanied by a revenue limit, setting a trap for any business that attempts to use it by changing the rules as they become more successful.

2. The AGPL does allow production use, by default, forever, but requires you publish associated source code when providing the service.

Only one of these licenses bans production use, and that's the BUSL. It can be modified to allow it under certain circumstances, but your original statement, that BUSL allows production use and AGPL prohibits it, is exactly reversed.

The AGPL doesn't prevent competing services.

At its core it's a question of control. If I use this library or app, will I be safe? Will I be able to repair it, use it in the future, pay someone to fix it? Will it still be developed in a few years?

FOSS is a great answer to the first few questions, but it fails at the last one. As a user, yes, I would prefer a cloud-protection license, if it means that software will still be developed in a few years time. It's not like I want to use this software to compete with the author, I'm happy not to be allowed to do that.

Well, there's no guarantee that there will be sufficient market in a few years for that software development to continue unless you fork it and do so (or pay to have done) yourself.

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