Comment by frognumber
2 years ago
@author You should consider your (likely) emotional and (definitely) ideological reaction to AGPL / GPL-style licensing and be pragmatic about which license you use for what.
I always work from first principals, and have written code which includes proprietary, public domain, and various forms of copyleft. They all have their place.
The licensing discussions become... religious in nature. It should really a pragmatic question of what kinds of ecosystem and behaviors you want.
The choice is and isn't about freedom. Most people are constrained by capitalist free markets (or other organizational mechanisms). If I'm competing and I keep your code open and a competitor makes theirs proprietary, they have an advantage. Ergo, in many domains, you see people forced to engage in obnoxious behavior as you're seeing to be competitive. Everyone can WANT to keep things open (or any other good behavior) but NOT be able to do it.
Something like the GPL can force everyone to do what they wanted to do, if their freedom wasn't taken away by the invisible hand of the market. Ditto for many regulations. Things which seem constraining can be liberating once you put a market system around it.
Except neither GPL, nor AGPL, would do anything about the case described. And that's even with AGPL violating freedom 0 through its tangled text.
Did you even read the case described? From the article:
"Many of them have made minor or major modifications to the tools, and next to none provide the source to those modifications"
"I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don't even provide the source to their modifications"
If you did, I don't think you understood it any better than the AGPL (or freedom zero). AGPL text is not tangled. It's a very-well written text, if that's the license scope you want.
The case described is the exact purpose of these license.
Footnote: I've released two major tools 95% under the AGPL (with a few minor components under more libertarian licenses). It was the right tool for that job.
Yeah, I've read the text.
And it's trivial to be compliant with AGPL in this case without any effective change to the behaviour or problems caused. Yes, there would be source code link somewhere, but it can take 0.01% of the SEO spam and be still compliant.
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