Comment by snakers41 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snakers41 | Hacker News Reader

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> Where the GPL was vague and exploited, the AGPL clarifies and closes the loophole

It can be easily surpassed. Just create a simple wrapper and publish it. And voila, you are can use everything for free again)

All of these FOSS licenses are just beautiful constructs, not related to how the world really works.

A simple question. How do people, building true FOSS libraries, make their ends meet, if everything is 100% free?

> ethics or enforcement are a distant concern.

The main thing that you are missing is that ethics and capitalism are very distant concerns.

> they make sure that nobody can use it except corporations without morals? What the fuck?

We live in different worlds, man.

The summary of your complaints is that you want to use NC software or artefacts for profit (basically to resell it in some form or another) … and you cannot because you are so moral.

But … just use it not for profit, or pay the authors, if you use it for profit. Simple, right?

> even more so than proprietary software

As an experiment, try stopping to use any non 100% FOSS software (or any software you did not pay for) for a day and report the results.

Well no, the wrapper could count as a derivative work. Even if the wrapper were permissively licensed rather than copyleft, the assembled whole of a product making use of the wrapper would arguably be covered. One of the glaring issues with the GPL is that copyright law imperfectly defines "derivative work"; though this works to the GPL's advantage as the ambiguity ensures the risk is taken by whomever is attempting to make use of the library or tool.

The GPL has been litigated against fairly deep-pocketed companies, and while there hasn't been much in the way of precedent-setting court decisions, there have been multiple victories in the sense that these huge companies settled rather than set that precedent.

The GPL is explicitly constructed to exist in the real world; it was founded on the premise that the infectious nature of copyright was toxic and should be twisted to more equitable means so that software would be shared as it should be, rather than hoarded and exploited.

NC is just another form of hoarding and exploitation.

> The summary of your complaints is that you want to use NC software or artefacts for profit (basically to resell it in some form or another) … and you cannot because you are so moral.

Yes, minus the profit. I want to use the software. Improve it, redistribute it, help people make it work for them. Because unlike you or the author, I actually give a shit about ethics, and I live in the real world where software has external costs to hosting and maintenance, which involve transacting in commerce to integrate or make use of tools. I'm pretty far left and anti-capitalist, but even full-blown communism still involves transacting in commerce!

I can't even look at the fucking source code, goddammit. Using it at all would create a master-servant relationship if I wanted to, for example, take a bounty to implement an open-source feature.

It's so fucking hypocritical and stupid and selfish. They might as well take it closed-source and distribute it for free if they're going to pull this shit. Would be less harmful.

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