Comment by istvan__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by istvan__ | Hacker News Reader

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Not really. I just know that Amazon's lawyer team has more expertise in law than I do. They also run a relatively large business while I am working for a small company. If their legal team decided that protecting their IP is best done by not opening up the company to a lawsuit (have you seen what happened to VMware btw?) than I think it is a pretty safe policy to follow for us the smaller corporation with smaller legal team.

I measure freedom in the license context by how much I have to do using a certain licensed software.

MIT, BSDL, Apache, EPL -> nothing

AGPL -> I need to open up every single thing that touches the service that uses AGPL

Which one is more free? In my interpretation the former. Please convince me that AGPL is more free than the other licenses. On the top of all that jazz, I really dislike the GPL/Gnu agenda of defining freedom to me. Let me show you what is the definition of freedom:

"the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint."

Opening open source code that I have no intention to open up sounds pretty restraining to me and also it qualifies as hindrance...

Screw millenia of political thought. Someone on Hacker News has defined what freedom is. That problem is now officially solved. Everyone can go home now. All those tiresome debates on libertarianism and positive vs. negative freedoms, dead. You've solved it. Congratulations. The debate is officially over.

I also don't necessarily agree with them, but: As already pointed out in other places in this thread, (A) GPL isn't about your (the developer offering a service) freedom, but focuses on the users. If you don't subscribe to their definition of freedom, of course it doesn't appear more free to you, and really the only way to convince you otherwise would be to convince you that their definition of freedom is the more important one.

And even then one can argue if the AGPL serves this best, because it also doesn't really help users if no-one offers services based on the software because they don't trust the legal situation.

Just pointing out some of the obvious:

- Yeah right, please explain this to my mom. She is a user of my software. Thank you in advance.

- Even if it was about my users you cannot re-define freedom for them aka same thing applies as I wrote above

- My users are also corporations and they banned AGPL

Checkmate. :)

By your definition, my inability to fly like birds qualifies as a lack of freedom.

I think you may be confusing your freedoms with your concrete possibilities (i.e what you can do).

Also, you need to distinguish the freedom of your users (X) from the freedom of the redistributors (Y). The (A)GPL licenses are about taking away some of Y to increase X.

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