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Comment by ferbivore | Hacker News Reader

FUTO develops, for the most part, proprietary software that they plan to monetize. The license choice isn't some mistake that you can get them to recant by explaining the virtues of the AGPL and third party distributors. (They're already aware of these things; one of the products under their umbrella is Immich, which was relicensed to AGPL after they started employing the original developer, as a compromise between his goals and FUTO's.) They're deliberately going for the same model as Unreal: source access is only provided a courtesy to users, and/or as part of a marketing strategy, and they have zero interest in allowing you to fork their software.

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> Immich, which was relicensed to AGPL after they started employing the original developer

To make a small correction, the AGPL relicensing happened _before_ joining FUTO, and was not a compromise.

(I'm part of the Immich team)

Sorry, that's right, it looks like the license change was a couple of months before. I must have misremembered something in Louis' announcement video.

while that is technically mostly correct, that does not properly reflect their intentions. they most certainly are interested in allowing you to fork their software as a user. but what they are also interested in is to prevent a fork to take revenue from the original developers.

so you can most likely (i don't know the details) fork and change and redistribute the code. what you can not do is exploit that commercially.

this goes in the directions of the discussions started by bruce perens that we need to rethink FOSS, because funded companies are taking advantage and making a profit from FOSS without paying the developers.

it is not obvious that FUTO's approach is the right one. it is an attempt at addressing the problem, and i expect that it will take more such experiments to shake out what the best approach to this problem really is.

That's not a fork in the sense normally used by the free software community. It's better than nothing, to be sure, and if Xerox had adopted this license back in 1980 maybe we wouldn't even be talking about free software today. But FUTO still maintains some control over what your fork can and cannot do, which violates freedom 1.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether this licensing approach is right or wrong, I just doubt "anyone from the team" would find lrvick's post a compelling argument for switching to a free software license considering their stated goals.

i was unaware that there was a free software definition of fork. for me fork is a technical term that is used to indicate that the forked codebase is going to be developed with a different goal than the original. which license the code has, and what the limitations of that license are, is not relevant for it to be a fork. i can make a fork of a closed source application if i have the code and the legal right to it (which i might have because i paid the owner for that right)

FUTO is not xerox. and i disagree that xerox is responsible for allowing free software to be developed. furthermore, the right to commercial exploitation is not what drove the idea of free software. commercial exploitation was necessary because otherwise selling tapes and other media with free software on them would not have been possible. today where distribution of software can be done pretty much without any cost at all, this right is no longer needed in just to be able to fork and distribute an application.

it is only needed if i want to be able to commercially exploit the changes i make to the application. this is where free software and these new source available licenses diverge. and this divergence is the entire point of these new licenses.

also historically there used to be an active community of the development of non-commercial software. many MUDs for example had a non-commercial license and each one of them was forked many times over.

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