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Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any of the free/open licenses require users to contribute to the parent project. I don't think any even require that people distributing modified versions, send those modifications back upstream.

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In fact there was a shitstorm when some licences had "all modifications must be sent upstream" clauses e.g. Plan9's original license had that clause. And then the "tick this box if you don't make nuclear weapons" clause was lambasted in Theo's colourful style [1]. There was a time when OpenBSD were considering moving to the plan9 tool chain - which is now available under both GPL and MIT licensing.

That sad part was, most everyone in the plan9 community agreed with him but had their hands tied by Alacatel/Lucent legal and US law.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/co...

The GPL kinda-sorta does. I guess it depends on your definition of "contribute back." People that derive from GPL source have to release those changes to the public, which could just be a zip archive on their web-site rather than a git pull request.

I guess what I mean is, the company can try to be as unhelpful as possible (e.g. strip comments, place all code into a giant .cpp file, etc) but it does technically have to publish source code regardless.

> People that derive from GPL source have to release those changes to the public

This is entirely not true. If I take a GPLed application, download it, modify it, and never distribute it, then I am under no obligation to release the source.

The GPL requires you to distribute source code in addition to binaries. If you don't distribute binaries (i.e. if you're running the code on your server farm only), then you don't have to distribute anything.

That is why some choose to license their work under AGPL.

And that's why some stay away from AGPL licensed projects.

If you work for a bigger organization these licenses are banned for a good reason. There are some companies who are a little bit too relaxed with this ban (like VMWare) and you can see the results. I know for fact that some of the big guys take licensing very seriously and there are licenses that are approved for use while others are banned. The want to make sure there is no surprise down the road.

That still only goes so far, though. If you're building a product on top of a database that's licensed with the AGPL, like Mongo, you have to distribute those changes.* If you build your Intranet site on Mongo, though, you don't need to distribute those changes in a way that gets back to upstream.

* I think. And I don't know if this has withstood the sort of court scrutiny the GPL has.

For the intranet site, I think you'd still need to make the source code available to users, who could then make the source publicly available.

IANAL, though, so I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL.

>I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL

Section 10 of both the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 prevent the imposition of "further restrictions" on the subject of the license.

I'm aware. What's not clear is whether applies to the individual components of an organization (i.e. its employees) or just the organization as a whole. I want to think the answer is that intra-organizational distribution still counts as distribution (and therefore cannot be restricted), but usually it's considered acceptable to use a modified version of (A)GPL'd software internally (i.e. not used outside the organization) without it counting as "distribution", so things are kind of fuzzy without explicit terms in that regard.

Such are the side-effects of treating organizations as singular entities :)

As far as I know mongo think they have solved this by providing dricers under a different licence.

Again, AFAIK, this licencing (AGPL + MIT/BSD or Apache) has not been tested in court.

And that would make no change for things like OSs.

If OpenBSD was AGPL and my ISP used it on all its network hardware with some custom modification, they still wouldn't be forced to contribute back those changes.

We need to stop making licences that attempt to force people to do the right thing, and start educating people to do the write thing out of free will.

People that derive from GPL source have to release those changes to the public

No, only to the people who have received binaries of those derivations.

    I don't think any even require that people distributing modified versions, send those modifications back upstream.

Copy Left licenses require those changes be shared on request. Which is pretty close.

Copyleft licenses require changes be shared on distribution, and only to whom binaries have been distributed.

Technically speaking, a license only has to require that changes be licensed under the same terms as the original to be deemed "copyleft".

The requirement to release source is specifically a GPLism and not part of all copyleft licenses. It's not infeasible for a copyleft license to imply "sure, it's legal for someone to create and distribute derivative works based on top of your modifications, but only if they have the technical skill to reverse-engineer it".

The Artistic License 2.0 (and possibly 1.0/1.1; I'm not as familiar with their license texts) specifies making changes available to the original author (without necessarily making them public) under the terms of the original license as one option for conditions by which one can use Artistically Licensed code (along with "give it a new name and don't interfere with installing the original version" and "release the source code publicly under a FOSS license", in that order).

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