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Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

How will Wire make money and stay viable while maintaining this level of service?

Open source is a development model and not a business model.

Exactly, the userbase and network effects are a potential profit source, the software is merely a means to an end.

Also mind the license. It means anyone competing with Wire has to comply with the AGPL which is specific to servers. If you modify the code, you must publish it, whilst Wire can retain their own modifications to the server.

Weirdly I think free licenses are great for businesses to use and open licenses are great for personal projects.

If I'm writing a hobby project, I want it to help the ecosystem as much as possible. If businesses want to use it then great! So MIT.

If I'm running a business my main goal is to survive. I want to help the community as well, but I obviously can't do that if I go broke. "Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" and all that. So *GPL, because it lets me balance those goals.

I'm not arguing against it or anything just pointing it out. AGPL keeps the lights on whilst still letting others play with it and contribute.

I understood you! I just wanted to add a few reasons why I (generally an open > libre guy) don't mind the AGPL in this case.

Understood, I only worry about AGPL if I'm working on a similar product for commercial work I would absolutely avoid looking at the code. Some licenses are fine for some companies, others are a nightmare. Apparently D had that issue for example.

This is really bad abuse of terminology. Non-copyleft and copyleft licenses are all both open source and free software licenses. They're all free and open, which are synonyms in the context of software licensing. I think you'll confuse people if you use the terminology as you are using it (plus it's just plain wrong).

Personally, if I'm writing a hobby project then I want it to be copyleft. Of course I want it to be copyleft. Why wouldn't I? I don't want some company taking my work, making proprietary changes and improvements to it and then not releasing those back to me. Copyleft is simple courtesy that you'd expect anyway, codified into a license.

I should have written libre not free. That has a clear meaning (and it's what I use in the followup comment). Do you have a better suggestion than "open" for "no restrictions on use"?

> Personally, if I'm writing a hobby project then I want it to be copyleft.

Totally up to you! In the context of Haskell projects though, I really, really want to see Haskell businesses succeed as well as the open Haskell ecosystem.

Permissive (like BSD) and copyleft (like GPL) are the most common terms in use.

BSD and GPL are both free, libre and open.

>Totally up to you! In the context of Haskell projects though, I really, really want to see Haskell businesses succeed as well as the open Haskell ecosystem.

There's nothing about the GPL (or other copyleft licenses) that makes them incompatible with business.

That's not accurate at all. If you contribute back changes to it then they have to comply with the license too and publish the source.

The entire purpose of the AGPL is that users of the server are now users of your program, so having access to the code is their right. IANAL but this is how I've always understood the AGPL to work.

See:

https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-lice...

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