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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

Same applies to BSL and similar. Not being able to compete with the project owners is much less restrictive, for me, than AGPL/GPL.

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But it restricts your ability to use a commodity product based on Elastic, provided by a third party who will compete on price or bundle it with other cloud services.

Yes, but what I'm more interested in is self-hosting. I couldn't care less that someone else is unable to profit off of others' work.

And of course the third party can compete on price, they don't have to develop the actual software they're selling!

The company that 'owns' Redis or Elastic also do not need to develop the software they are selling. They already have it, since its creation for free on a non-commercial basis.

Without competition, they are free to charge any rent they like for it.

If you think that the person that originally wrote Redis or Elastic should have an exclusive license to charge people to use that software, that's a totally valid opinion and a totally valid licensing/business model. However, it has nothing to do with open source software.

GPL is viral and somewhat compatible with AGPL.

BSL and GPL code are probably never mixing since they prohibit each other. This creates friction in GPL world and tends to produce incidents line this [1] out of thin air.

1. https://github.com/jshint/jshint/issues/1234

Sure, but the issue that you link is different. The "problem" there is that Debian (and many others) only distribute software that complies with the open source definition of freedom, which Crockford's license and the BSL runs afoul of as they both discriminate against uses. So, this is about what some are willing to distribute, not license compatibility.

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