Comment by ValentineC

10 hours ago

> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem.

I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.

28 comments

ValentineC

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tyre  10 hours ago

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.

If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.

  • tlamponi  6 hours ago

    > if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it

    No, it isn't; a client talking to an AGPLv3 service over a network API stays a separate program and is not touched by the license at all. Section 13 places obligations solely on whoever runs a modified version of the service, while remote users, API clients included, only gain the right to receive that service's source. So nothing on the client side must suddenly become AGPLv3, and the only thing that ever has to be shared is the AGPL'd program itself, not anything across the API boundary. The first half of your post is basically unfounded FUD; the second half tracks.

    • mbreese  6 hours ago

      You may think this. I may think this. But what really matters is if the lawyers for your customers think this. It may be pure FUD, but AGPL projects have a tough time getting adoption in companies because they would rather avoid the problem than be wrong.

      1 reply →

  • guywithahat  9 hours ago

    I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.

    • inigyou  9 hours ago

      They're right, but they're presenting it in a way as if the toxicity of AGPL is the actual truth, and not just the opinion of greedy corporations.

      Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.

      6 replies →

    • toomuchtodo  9 hours ago

      Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.

      2 replies →

rajangdavis  10 hours ago

Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code

  • spudlyo  10 hours ago

    Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.

    • rajangdavis  10 hours ago

      I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.

      I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.

      I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.

      3 replies →