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Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

Just because you disagree with the terms of a license doesn't make it "proprietary". Is the AGPL also "proprietary"?

It would be far more productive to state your particular disagreement(s) than to inaccurately apply labels you think will tarnish the target of your ire.

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I think that Common Clause is proprietary while AGPL is open source. This should not be a matter of opinion. AGPL asks you to redistribute the work back, however if you complain with the share back clauses, you can do whatever you want with the code. This is not the case of Common Clause. However if we don't focus too much on the Open Source license yes/no, we can see how there is a spectrum of licenses... and Common Clause allows many freedoms to actual users compared to other non-OSS licenses, and in certain respects even VS AGPL.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I now understand and agree with this position, and observe that it was the "spectrum" aspect that caught me out: I'm used to thinking of a "proprietary" license as being far more restrictive than Common Clause. It's possible see both the OSS and proprietary aspects in this license.

Any license that includes the ""Commons Clause"" is by definition proprietary, it precludes incorporating the code into anything commercial and even prohibiting anyone from providing paid support for it (which seems even more extreme).

It's a set of anti-commercial license terms and is definitely proprietary by Free Software and Open Source definitions.

I will remove "proprietary" from my post. The gist of my objection is not the content of the license, but the implied endorsement of the Apache Software Foundation.

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