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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

The FSF has created the AGPL 16 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...), so it's not like they didn't see the turn that software was going into. But it was already a losing battle, because every developer wants to think they might become millionaire and won't use it.

Whether the software runs on my computer or not, if I am the user, I must be in control.

Whether the meal is prepared in my kitchen or not, if I am going to eat it, I must be in control.

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AGPL is also the license you should use if you don't want big corporations to use your software. Big Tech even avoids GPL-3 and stick to GPL-2 from what I have noticed.

Note that AGPL does not actually protect your software from big companies (or small companies) running your software as a service. It requires them to contribute back or make source available when they make changes, and IIRC thats to the user (who could be an enterprise customer under some other agreement even, but none of this is tested in court).

If you want that sort of protection, BSL, SSPL, Elastic license, etc are what you want.

If you want to make Free Software, make it. Know that people you don’t like may use your software, even criminals may. That is what Free Software is. OSS is slightly different but similar.

If you want to make shareware, make shareware — no judgements on people who want to make money with their software and believe thats the best path.

I'm fine with big corporations use my software: the deal is that whatever they do with it, they must give it back to the users with the same license. Make it live beyond the company's existence and control. It's still better than my software being non-copyleft and being used by a company.

I wish they would give back all the profit as well but that's another topic and the AGPL doesn't touch that.

OT, but how are you in control if you buy food that you haven't produced yourself?

Just like you aren't in control of your software if you didn't write your compiler yourself, if you didn't build your compiler yourself, all the way down to the minerals.

You're never 100% in control, but that doesn't mean you should try and maximize it.

One difference with food is that you can switch your food supplier any time, it doesn't hold your data or account connections hostage.

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