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Comment by shiven | Hacker News Reader

Moral of the story? Use GPL.

If only Etherpad had done so in the first place.

You probably mean AGPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License)? The GPL wouldn't have made a difference, as it doesn't require you to release the source of something that you run as a web service.

The Web is the Ultimate Copy Protection

http://advogato.org/article/216.html

Fascinating article, and with original comments from 2000, neat! It's interesting to see the arguments for and against protections of these sorts haven't changed in a long time.

I emailed the link to RMS. (He's very good about replying to mail.) He responded by saying that he was aware of the problem, and wanted to solve it but could not do so anytime soon.

To be clear, I mailed him the link in 2000.

If EtherPad had been GPL I have my doubts Hackpad would have ever been forked from it or if Hackpad would have even been a thing.

So, maybe more people would have used and even contributed to Etherpad then… who knows

Etherpad was completely unmaintainable when it was shut down as a service and open-sourced. Its first, open-source major rewrite (etherpad-lite) didn't work. It took a second major rewrite by a profit-motivated startup (Hackpad) to become useful again.

I think that if Etherpad had been GPLed, we would still have nothing but etherpad-lite, and we would lament Etherpad as a lost technology.

I'm curious what you mean when you say etherpad-lite "didn't work". I use it fairly regularly and while I'll agree it's not nearly as refined as Hackpad, it seems to basically function.

(Note that I'm not debating the GPL point. I don't personally think Hackpad's forking the code has had any meaningful effect on etherpad-lite's popularity; there are plenty of collaborative document editors out there.)

It would corrupt its data when too many people were using it at the same time.

Wrong. The current Etherpad open source project and what you mean are not the same. The first one is the predecessor of Google Wave Java based product, and the current one "Etherpad Lite" is a JavaScript & Node.js based open source project - a reimplementation, possible as Google open sourced the original Java code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad

Etherpad was not a predecessor to Wave -- Wave was already released when Etherpad was acquired. They did use similar ideas, though.

I don't think that's a good reason to use GPL.

I think it's better for something to be open source when its creator wants it to be open, not because they're forced to.

GPL wouldn't made a difference here, since it's a web service. The AGPL story is different. I think you are too trusting when you say that the creator goodwill will prevail - as an author, you are better off making this enforceable, even if you don't plan to sue anyone. Also, one can go the MySQL way - dual licensing. You end up with more options in hands by using AGPL, and that's a good thing.

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