I could be wrong, but I thought the main reason for the license change was due to predatory practices of large organizations like amazon or gcp taking open source tech, privatizing it and leveraging cloud advantages at a high price point. Its a hard road to keep open source open while predatory orgs can make a profit providing the same product just at scale. Again, just my own interpretation and always up to learn more about things.
I‘m not privy to the intricacies of licensing yet, only getting there. But something that keeps devs from taking their work and those of others and making it closed source or whatever suits their needs would be great.
AGPL is a “do not touch” license to commercial interests in that it forces anything using AGPL code to be open source, and does wonders for weeding out the truly bad actors. From my understanding, AGPL code cannot be relicensed, making the license ideal for telling greedy devs (and management) who only see money without contributing back to get fucked.
Some projects offer dual licenses to those that don’t want to abide by the AGPL, and accept payment in return to fund development.
Personally, due to the shenanigans in the past few years, almost all of my own projects since 2020 (with a few exceptions) are AGPL from the initial commit.
Thats pretty awesome. I read about the agpl and I use it in a project of mine newly.
Do you have any resources to read up about the thought process behind licensing? Because I see two arguments here:
Companies should be able to use it and kick back a portion of their revenue (not profit) as you have in youtube videos being made into derivative works outside of fair use.
Users should make stuff for users and companies should make their own stuff.
Both sites have breakdowns of each license for the layperson. As always, the GNU Licenses page has others.
In response to your arguments:
While I personally agree with this 100%, it unfortunately doesn’t fall under the OSI definition of open-source. I’m only saying this because I ranted on another ActivityPub service about that last year after several high-profile open-source projects switched over to more restrictive licenses. I was called out by a number of people for even suggesting that closed-source developers should be required to pay up. In the end, the consensus was to use AGPL or a license with such a muddy definition that Legal departments can’t use to work with such as the WTFPL or Good, not Evil license (full text to the Good, not Evil license here).
Also in agreement with this, except in cases where a user’s project becomes their full-time job and financial compensation is required. From there, I find it ethical to charge for personalised support. There unfortunately are developers that work at large businesses that try to hide who they are working for in order to get support without contributing in some way.
The choice is mainly about how much effort you’re willing to pour into supporting the project alone if others take interest in it, how much you want others to be willing to pour into supporting your project via contributions or financials, and how you would feel if a more successful fork of your project becomes more restrictive after a license change or organisation restructuring (looking at you, Gitea and RedHat).
My personal choice in license is simple. Most of my software is for me and works on my machines. I also don’t want commercial entities providing my software as a service without contributing code back, so AGPL is an easy choice. I do have a disclaimer on my public facing git forge that none of my AGPL licensed projects support dual licensing because I value code contributions more than money, especially if they come from the enterprise sector.
Thats awesome! Thank you so much for taking the time to write this out. I have a good understanding of your pov now and I like it.
Would you mind connecting on dm or matrix if one ever wanted to help? I‘m currently working on a couple projects which require me to step up my game quite a lot. I‘d be interested in your opinion.