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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

> possibly not complying with the MIT license

Regardless of the validity of this claim, the past decade of watching Big Tech Companies make tons of money on the back of Free Software has pushed me away from the X/MIT-style licenses and back to the (A)GPLv3. For a while I was swayed by the arguments that they're "more free" due to fewer individual restrictions, but I've since realized how many definitions of the word "free" we're operating under and that I have a different one than many of the MIT License advocates. I would prefer a smaller user base comprised of people each willing to make a small sacrifice (GPL requirements) for the overall benefit of collectively-singular Humanity.

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I remember seeing similar post about amazon and Microsoft taking over names of projects and publishing as their projects. I remember the MS one was worse as they forked the repo, didn't credit original author and when confronted, people working in MS, tried to cover it up by reformatting code, changing var and function names.

In the BSD licenses, the trend has been toward the ‘simplified’ versions without the advertising clause, which are very similar to the MIT license. But it was the advertising clause that broke AT&T in their lawsuit against BSD, because AT&T had violated the advertising clause by promoting the inclusion of vi in System V without credit.

Same here, GPL for free beer, want to make money out of it? Lets talk about a commercial license.

Or make money by selling a service around this (A)GPL code, but provide the modified code to your users if you modified it (even better, publish the code for everyone, but that's not required by the GPL, otherwise it would not be a free software license anymore).

This is important: one can build a service around an open source project and make money without paying or asking for a specific license. People doing this still need to give the code to their users if they request it with the same rights, and will be incentivized to contribute back upstream if they need to adapt the code to provide their service because it is less costly than maintaining an ever diverging fork, which is great! Do sell commercial services around my GPL code!

A commercial license is only needed to allow building proprietary software based on the GPL code, but it is only possible to provide one if the project has no other contributors than the one selling the commercial license, or those contributors sign a CLA.

While this sounds logical and reasonable, the FOSS community doesn't consider it acceptable since it's not considered totally free.

MongoDB got raked through the coals when they tried making a license with this purpose. They ended up having to backtrack [1]. I don't understand people's desire to give these billion-dollar corporations everything for free.

[1] https://hub.packtpub.com/mongodb-withdraws-controversial-ser...

Edit: Instead of downvoting this, how about actually explaining why apparently this is such a terrible idea.

AGPL basically kills any commercial use of the code, which is where 95% of real breakthroughs happen.

> 95% of real breakthroughs happen

Is it? What hat are you pulling this number from?

You don't have to search for very long before you realize how much government-funded research and code has improved our life. Department of Energy labs, National Science Foundation, DARPA, Apollo Space Program, Human Genome Project and more are all publicly funded and responsible for some of the biggest "real breakthroughs" in human history, and that's just projects from the US.

Didn't you know that 87% of statistics are made up on the spot?

Actually, it's 97% - I think you're confusing it with the similar but unrelated quote by Abraham Lincoln: "85% of quotes on the internet are made up.".

Now I know you're making that up. The internet didn't even exist until Al Gore invented it!

I suspect there's not always a complete separation of "government-funded" vs "commercial" labels, especially in the case of things like Apollo and DARPA, where defence contractors essentially work as commercial companies on contracts for the US government / NASA, so it's not completely black and white in that area.

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook avoid touching AGPL software with a ten foot pole.

Choosing AGPL is a great way to isolate yourself from any collaboration with that community

Yes, that's exactly the point. I don't want those people around my codebase. Nobody on a Crusade to get you to adopt ProtoBuffers or Thrift. No codes of conduct. No risk of getting abandoned when priorities shift (like HHVM dropping support for PHP code). Heaven! I love software again :D

I don’t mean that kind of humanity-defining breakthroughs, but the kind that depend on OSS libraries - new social, entertainment, commerce and productivity tools that change our lives incrementally.

AGPL basically kills any commercial use of the code

Yeah, that's right :)

That's the whole point after all, amirite?

>commercial use of the code, which is where 95% of real breakthroughs happen.

I don't believe this at all. Data to back your statement?

What would happen to a commercial software breakthrough if it was licensed using AGPL?

Why are you asking it hypothetically? We have many examples of that. For example, Overleaf (the online LaTeX editor) is a service based on AGPL code for which my lab pays a significant amount of money each month.

Because I'm curious what the mindset behind "AGPL doesn't work for commercial environments" is.

It's a common, recurring statement and I'm sure people have good reasons to believe it. I can guess what that thinking might be, but there's no substitute for asking.

You have a list of AGPL-licensed software here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_under_the_GNU...

The list is not at all up to date, and very incomplete, but it's better than nothing. You can see that there's quite a few well-known infrastructure projects there.

The point of the AGPL is to prevent certain usage. If you want companies to consider paying you for an alternative license, the first step is choosing an Open Source license that they're not thrilled with.

If the author is the sole contributor or asks contributors for copyright assignments, then they can offer a paid license as well for "commercial use".

I think it boils down to for whom it is "free" between MIT and GPL - is it "free" for the monopolies/duopolies or is it free for the users.

GPL doesn't make any distinction between single proprietors, regular businesses and monopolies. It is all or nothing.

If one follows this path, then also the anticapitalist license[https://anticapitalist.software/] should be considered.

Edit: I love political downvotes

Don't post a politically charged page if you don't want political downvotes.

I just contributed to the discussion with a related link. That's not how votes are supposed to work on HN at all, but ok, please go on.

Btw this topic is inherently political, to treat it differently means to have no wish for a fruitful discussion about it.

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