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Comment by asymmetric | Hacker News Reader

If they made their tools AGPL, they themselves couldn’t build a cloud offering with additional, closed-source features.

That's not true. As the copyright holder they are not bound by the licence that they release it to others under.

The reason AGPL isn't being adopted in these situations is that it doesn't sufficiently protect against someone doing what e.g. AWS repeatedly does - turning open-source projects into services and then dominating the market while continuing to benefit from the upstream project. See the ElasticSearch licence change for a prominent example.

I am not sure being closed source is much comfort if AWS decide they want to crush you.

Isn’t that precisely what AGPL is for?

A license controls what OTHERS can do with your source. You, the copyright holder, can do anything you want.

Thanks, I stand corrected. How does this play with third-party contributions? Others might be the copyright-holders of a sub-section of the code.

You ask contributors to sign a copyright assignment before accepting their changes.

Projects can have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). It gives the owner of the project a right to republish (or copyright) the contributions. You can't contribute to the project without signing it.

This might also prevent a lot of people from contributing due to the added paperwork.

Only if you accept contributions without a license grant CLA.

And this is why I think people who love Software Freedom should think twice about signing a CLA for their copyleft licensed contributions. [1]

inbound=outbound license terms is a good norm for FOSS. Why should a software vendor play by different rules than everyone else when it comes to things like copyleft compliance?

[1] https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-l...

From a pragmatic perspective, it is much easier to enforce an open source license with a lawsuit if you own 100% of it.

This is true. The question to me is: does the party to whom you give the rights and authority subscribe to community-oriented FOSS license compliance principles? [1]

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

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