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Comment by iso1210 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft spent a lot of money and energy in the late 90s and 00s to convince the world - especially business and legal people - that the GPL was a "cancer"

The GPL is one of the cleanest licenses out there. Use the code in your project, give the source of your project to anyone you give the binaries to, job done.

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A lot of people wrongly assume that if you license the product under GNU GPL, you must publish source code on the internet. Many active proponents of free (as in freedom) software had very tense quarrells with me when I explained them that it's not exactly mandatory.

This is a small point to argue. Even if you choose to distribute your source on-demand by CD in an envelope with postage stamps on it, the next logical step is for a customer to just put that code on github. So, what then is the difference?

Putting it on github (or a zip file on your website) is less of a hassle.

If the customer paid a really high price for software and source code (like a few million dollars), he might rightfully decide that publishing it and giving it to everyone for free is not in their best interests.

That used to be the business model of Adacore and the GNAT compiler.

Their compiler was technically GPL, but they sold it for thousands of dollars to businesses, with the implied threat that they would let the phone ring for a while when a customer who distributed the sources had a problem.

Since their customers are using it for safety- and mission-critical software, noone would ever dare to cross them.

I mean, I agree, but isn't it a moot point? Isn't part of the reason you get all your contributors to sign CLAs so that you can put whatever license on your product you need to close a deal?

> Isn't part of the reason you get all your contributors to sign CLAs so that you can put whatever license on your product you need to close a deal?

This is true if you use a CLA, but that's going to reduce external contributions. In some cases you may not care about that.

This is a naive view. Most companies try to limit or restrict the scope of what they must open source. With the GPL, depending on the version, how the code interacts with your project (static linking, dynamic linking, IPC, etc.) you may or may not have to release your code under the same license.

In particular Google's strong anti-AGPL stance has caused a chilling effect for adoption of AGPL projects at companies, hence why commercial licensing is frequently an option.

Finally, you can believe whatever you want, but ultimately it's the lawyers who decide, and your ass (assuming you're an IC) isn't the one on the line when shit hits the fan. Lawyers don't like GPLv3 and they don't like AGPL.

The AGPL means that all code that links to it must also be published as AGPL. You don’t have to be Google to recognize how contagious thst could be.

> Lawyers don't like GPLv3 and they don't like AGPL.

Whose lawyers? Why would the lawyers at your company object that your choice of license for the free software that you publish is the AGPL or the GPL?

This is a post about running an open source company. In other words, you have to worry about your prospective customer's lawyers objecting to your product just because it is in part AGPL. You could just upsell with a different license; but from a business model perspective that makes the distribution channel of open source irrelevant.

What you are describing sounds more like a problem with sales, or marketing, than with legal. I don't think your legal department would prefer you to use BSD instead of AGPL.

>I don't think your legal department would prefer you to use BSD instead of AGPL.

Google's legal department is the problem: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

There's likely nothing your sales or marketing team can when Google, and companies that cargo cult Google's legal, decide not to allow your product gain a foot in the door because of its license.

The last sentence of that policy is the whole point of a FOSS company using AGPL

> In some cases, we may have alternative licenses available for AGPL licensed code.

Large companies pay, others don't need to.

> The GPL is one of the cleanest licenses out there. Use the code in your project, give the source of your project to anyone you give the binaries to, job done.

I'd encourage you to read the GOLs and some of the legal commentary about them, if you haven't already. "Clean" is a value judgment, but as one who routinely handles both open source and commercial license agreements, I'd never refer to GPL as particularly "clean", and I doubt I have any colleagues who would.

The summary you give is not complete, overall. And it omits a lot of details that can prove important.

All we would need to do is rename the GPL to something else. That’s it. It really is that dumb. Just don’t tell anyone it’s a renamed GPL and maybe rearrange some wording.

We abandoned GPL for the BSL for this reason. The GPL is in many ways better but there are a ton of companies that won’t touch it or anything that comes near it... though they tend to grandfather in Linux.

Smart companies use a whitelist of licenses.

Then they can give the source code out to anyone...

And?

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