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Comment by _wxn8 | Hacker News Reader

The FSF's definition of "Free Software" doesn't necessarily match the English language's definition of "free software". Since we're speaking English, I think it's reasonable to assume the latter meaning, like most reasonable people who haven't encountered the FSF would.

I really wish people would capitalize things like this. "This is not Free Software" would make the sentence unambiguous. You can't just go around redefining the English language willy nilly and expect people to play along.

Languages do evolve naturally but this isn't natural. This is an organization trying to influence the language to advance an agenda (though I believe it to be a worthy agenda, it's still an agenda).

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"It's a shame Duplicacy is not free software."

If the commenter meant no cost it's more reasonable they'd have said "It's a shame Duplicacy is not free". Or "It's a shame Duplicacy costs money".

Capitalising would have made it clearer yes, but I think given the language and the context (hacker news) I was justified. But the author, @acrosync, was also justified in assuming it meant no cost.

Free or not free aside, my question is, does it matter to personal users between this free-for-personal-use license and any of those more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD, or GPL?

It matters to me as a personal user because my use of duplicacy might change at some point and suddenly I'd lose rights to use it (unless I pay). I'd lose rights to any development contributions I might have made unless I pay.

And as a personal user, I can't use any code from Duplicacy in any other project. I can't even, say, create a package for it and get it included in Debian.

And aside from some of these practical issues, I'm a personal user who supports software freedom so I don't want to use something encumbered in this way.

And as a commercial user, any development contributions I make are no longer my own and I have to pay to make use of them.

But the worst part of it is, your license isn't very well defined. As it stands, you may at any point stop accepting license payments from a commercial user and they'd lose the right to use it entirely - they'd lose access to their backups (unless they used the software without a license).

You of course have the right to choose any license you like! I just wouldn't use duplicacy myself under the terms of that license.

Thanks for your feedback. The reason I don't like open-source licenses is that I don't want for-profit companies to use my software without paying. The ideal license would be the one that requires them to pay while being appealing to personal users like you. I don't think these two goals are irreconcilable, but unfortunately such a license doesn't exist yet.

I did wonder if being fully free might encourage more users who might fund you in other ways but Borg backup isn't making very much like that, so perhaps not: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/borgbackup

The AGPL license might be a step in the right direction (for your requirements). It aims to at least ensure that if companies use the code to provide a service to other users, they have to release their changes. You can sell those companies a different license if they don't want to accept the AGPL (you'd have to have a contributor agreement to assign copyright to you though, to allow you to relicense code at your discretion like that).

Or there is the open core model (like nginx-plus), where you provide the code under an open source license but provide some additional "enterprise" features (like your vmware stuff) to only those that pay. I'm not a fan but it seems to work for some.

Anyway, duplicacy sounds a great design. All the best with it!

It's stopped me from using it for personal use.

From a practical standpoint, it makes it more difficult for me to trust that it will be maintained in the long-term, or that I can extend its functionality if I see a need.

Ideologically, I'm somewhat uncomfortable using duplicacy when fully-free alternatives exist. I'm not a free software purist by any definition (I use steam. I have a Netflix subscription. My android has google apps on it.), but this is an area where compelling free software solutions do exist.

The license also keeps it from being packaged in most Linux distributions, which makes it a nuisance.

It is an issue of trust for something as important as a backup tool.

Duplicacy sounds great but it has 6 [0] contributors and Borg has 107 [1]. It's obvious which one has more eyes on it.

Plus I can apt-get install borgbackup / apt-get upgrade which adds another level of trust.

[0]: https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy

[1]: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg

We just released the source code less than 2 months ago. The difference in contributor counts may not be this big in one or two years from now.

I hate switching backup software, and with your current license, you become a single point of failure--will you be supporting this thing in 10 years when I need to back my FireflyBSD 128-bit RiscV machine up to the walmart cloud (or whatever random os/hardware/cloud is common in a decade)?

If this were BSL licensed, the community could fork it if that became an issue:

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2016/08/applying-business-sou...

I'm curious to see whether any BSL software manages to build a third party dev community (inclusion in debian non-free, third party patches and bug reports, etc)

While I have your attention: It'd be great to measure how many bytes the solutions read and write, as well as I/O counts. There are tools for this in Linux, and probably MacOS. Alternatively, network bandwidth would be a good proxy for these measurements.

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