I changed my license(bergie.iki.fi) |
I changed my license(bergie.iki.fi) |
I hate that some people like to put us all in the same bag. Please don't include me. I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code. I publish it as such because it's a present to the world at large that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT.
You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please.
I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk.
We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.
No. YOU changed your mind, to become less free and more authoritarian.
> gained little for users
What? The world runs on Linux.
> or developers.
Were you even there before "everything" was open source and/or free software?
> our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
Yeah that was always allowed.
The problem with freedom is that people get to make their own choices, eh?
The EULA needs a clause that 10% of the market cap of a company will be paid to the IP holder upon violating it.
I'm now sure what if any argument they are using in Europe. Most countries here have a "fair dealing" exemption which is similar to USA "fair use", but it doesn't include "transformative use". The closest would be "pastiche", but that wouldn't really cover it.
For example you can say someone can only copy this CD if they pay you $10. Ordinarily you're allowed to sue them for copying it, but you're allowed to promise not to sue them, under any condition whatsoever, such as them paying you $10.
But you can't say someone can only resell this CD if they pay you $10. You already don't have the right to sue them for reselling it, so they have no reason to listen to you.
But what we still can do is stop programming for free for Big Tech, and this license at least gets us closer toward that goal.
(I'm the author of that blog post)
And if you expand the acronym EULA you will actually find that it is… a license agreement.
If EULA is the same as a license, why would MSFT not just use a license? The intellectual contortions of the AI boosters here are stunning.
I don't understand this question.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
[1] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/di...
[2] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/ho...
* BigTech can take your EUPL library and write a small wrapper in MPL
* such a wrapper can therefore be used in any project, even a closed one that is a network service.
* however all of that still qualifies as distributing EUPL, and the EUPL core would still need to be made available under EUPL (whether modified or not).
Saying that since I have an MPL wrapper then all the code is MPL is not allowed.
So you can't just copy all the code and change the license to MPL.
This is basically AGPL without virality and anti-tivo, correct?
I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.
EDIT: Went to go research this. First thing I learned is the license has been around since 2007. It was updated in 2017. So maybe scratch my comment about it being a new license!
Other languages can be found here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eu...
Another article comparing LGPL and this license sounds good and I am interested in that as well. This article though is a good nudge to start thinking about licensing.
Eg: is there a clean way to dual license such that hobbyist, and exploratory work (eg: a proof of concept done in a commercial setting) are allowed, but using it in production requires a fee?
If you've done this, has it been successful? Obviously there's been many projects relicense over recent years (terraform, redis, etc) - but it's less clear to me if this is a viable path for new projects starting out, or if it just kills adoption from the beginning.
Personally, it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work. Just don't redirect commercial support tickets onto community projects, or get neglected customers to contact authors.
The way I see it... is symbiotic commercial relationships are important, as people can get their time sponsored to work on FOSS code. Also, having community projects form reliable long term infrastructure opens additional opportunity for people to work with FOSS options.
Telling people how they should have fun is always lame... whether it is Sony/Microsoft... or just some disillusioned dude convinced their work won't be obfuscated by an LLM in 30 seconds. =3
Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit lost to me.
They cover a very specific niche GPL/AGPL/etc. do not cover properly.
Huh. My story is that 15 to 20 years ago, as a young programmer, I read some of Stallman's writings and I was convinced that copyleft was the only way to keep free software free.
Copyleft vs permissive seems like a "paradox of intolerance". There's no paradox. You cut down intolerance where you see it.
But then I'm a big skeptic and I'm always willing to believe that everyone else could be wrong. Which is not a great heuristic, except when you're actually right.
Presumably you can also sell access to it with a full commercial licence if one chooses?
Did anyone ever claimed, open source was a way to get super rich in money?
It was always about access to source, to study, to tinker, to improve upon. We now have huge ressources of open source software to learn from - indeed a win I say.
And it is not clear at all to me, that the alternative timeline would have been any better, if FOSS and a strong copyleft would have won as developers choice and standard - I rather would expect it to be way more niche - and trillionaires would be as rich as ever.
I created something like this on my github and then i relicensed what i could that was purely mine, and kept other stuff unchanged and only used those licenses as default going forward mostly.
I chose EUPL also for pure AGPL style OSS work. and I plan to use other licenses as needed.
Aside from that, it is nice to see Communication counted alongside Distribution; this should have been done from the start IMO.
Full right to use no conditions ≠ full right on what you can do with the code
2. Scope of the rights granted by the Licence
The Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive,
sublicensable licence to do the following, for the duration of copyright vested
in the Original Work:
- use the Work in any circumstance and for all usage,
- reproduce the Work,
- modify the Work, and make Derivative Works based upon the Work,
- communicate to the public, including the right to make available or display
the Work or copies thereof to the public and perform publicly, as the case may
be, the Work,
- distribute the Work or copies thereof,
- lend and rent the Work or copies thereof,
- sublicense rights in the Work or copies thereof.
Those rights can be exercised on any media, supports and formats, whether now
known or later invented, as far as the applicable law permits so.
In the countries where moral rights apply, the Licensor waives his right to
exercise his moral right to the extent allowed by law in order to make effective
the licence of the economic rights here above listed.
The Licensor grants to the Licensee royalty-free, non-exclusive usage rights to
any patents held by the Licensor, to the extent necessary to make use of the
rights granted on the Work under this Licence.
There's not even a hint of conditions until three sections later, in section 5 where it starts modifying section 2, which feels messy to me.
It is a viable argument, and people shouldn't bury such insights given the estimated $9Tn worth of opensource work that was appropriated. =3
Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.
Have you seen LLMs build large, stable, pieces of software, that work well, with your own eyes? I have not. I have seen LLMs build small, well-understood things, and I've seen LLMs do super well with extremely well specified problems, but all the rest seems to be marketing (i.e. I couldn't observe or reproduce it).
Edit: I'm not talking about throwaway slop that just needs to run long enough to get funding.
A normal person like me? No way, I can't afford the money nor time.
I know GPL have some backing of SFC and FSF, but all others like EUPL, MIT, APL and so forth?
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I have to disagree. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. You take some, you give back. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business. And not having access to it would absolutely not have stopped corporate behemoths from getting where they are, but would have killed many small businesses and startups.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use, unless you are a large company. The code becomes MIT-licensed automatically after a set window to remove maintainability concerns.
This is not true. Open source is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good thing that open source unlocks.
And so it is time to stop messing about with permissive licenses. If corporations don’t want to use our software under our terms, they are free to spend the effort or tokens to build their own."
Funny, my reaction was to just make all my stuff Unlicense instead of MIT.
Personally I'm still in the BSD camp, but my current ranking is BSD/MIT > EUPL > (L)GPL now.
You're either writing software for fun and you are happy to give it away. In which case anyone's use of it is to do as they please including make money is just bragging right for you.
Or you write software for a living in which case giving it away for free is dumb. You want to charge maximally for your money making output.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
AGPL doesn't bar use in commercial production, but the requirements usually scare off any corporate from using it in production.
A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between government and big tech is starting to smell a little bit like fascism. Sorry, I have only complaints, not any good answers.
Yes, it's called language. Contracts are nothing but text, so why don't you just write down what you think should be the rules around using your software by other people?
I get the urge of a lot of developers to pick an existing third party license from the shelf, but just as you can write your own code - and are not required to use ready-made libraries/frameworks - you can write your own open source license for your software.
MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.
So, we wind up alienating all potential customers because we are so worried about preventing ideological crime.
People will steal your ideas and they will get away with it. The more you react to this in first order terms, the more it will destroy you.
Most money in software is made with support contracts, not the initial sale.
You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.
How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?
Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!
Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).
It stops companies from building high-revenue products for free, while not being as scary as AGPL/LGPL from the business perspective, and completely unrestricted for everyone else (despite not being technically an open-source license).
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.
I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International
Copyleft doesn't say that they can't, it says they have to make their changes available
For example, if someone wants to do something creative... they shouldn't have to cite 400 different peoples licenses. That isn't sustainable or fun.
I will stick with Apache 2.0, but understand different folks have other use-cases =3
And as others have said the deceptive term of "plugging the SaaS loophole" ignores that it means most software cannot be combined with it. Most. By far most.
Sure, some people will say "well fuck that software". And that's a stance. But it ain't freedom.
I don’t understand what angle people are coming from, when they disregard the community effects of open-source software entirely. If your main goal is to make money, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a business instead.
With billions of people online someone is always having the best or worst day of their lives. I rather people be honest about what they think, and trust respectful disagreement is welcome. Have a great day =3
I find that very surprising, but I have seen some shops practice clean room coding policies. =3
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
Or, a copyright troll is functionally indifferent from a copyleft troll.
It is important to keep the path clear for kids to build their own success stories. =3
Also, changing license does not prevent you from forking the source code before the change. There are no new libraries with kernel level effort that use uncommon license.
They don't, the companies just replace the software in question.
The magic of the web has always been that things would continuously morph through being reinterpreted and all, and that just doesn't happen with ND.
I can of course see the valid reasons why one would pick that license, but it's still.. kinda sad that it's culturally dead.
As both a consumer and producer, NC makes it kind of a pointless untouchable dead end even if I never intend to make a business out of something.
A lot of unintended things could be argued as commecial and who wants to risk it? If I do something purely as ahobby, and along the way make a youtube video about it, and that video pays money, I suddenly become techically in violation of non-commercial. Or I use it in a class where I was paid to teach. Or any number of ordinary possible uses that along the way do involve an exchange of money.
Let alone the freedom to change my mind in 5 years and decide I do want to sell something I made that initially I didn't.
I don't know what I might want to do tomorrow, so best to just not invest any of my time or effort into anything that might bite me later.
ND is 100x worse. Why even bother publishing a design at all then? Just sell your commercial propeietary product, and any users who want the plans you can just sell them more service for support and customization instead.
So I only apply BY-SA to be as similar to classic GPL as possible, and it's no problem at all if there is a business that can't accept the SA terms. It doesn't prevent selling a product, it just prevents being a dick and a thief (well on paper anyway, of course they go ahead and steal anyway but that's a different problem).
If I ever had something where I didn't want anyone else to be able to sell it, I just wouldn't publish it at all in the first place.
I like CC because I like my books to be read and I still make money. When people choose to pay I use that as a signal for which topics to put future effort into.
My wife has been my editor for ever, so this is a family business.
EDIT: over 20 years ago, I was what I think was Larry Lessig’s second ‘Featured Commoner’ and that was fun because they interviewed me and posted the interview in the CC web site.
As there's no publication date listed, and I'm particularly intolerant to slop, can you recommend a book of yours published before Autumn 2022?
https://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/03/27/german-court-says-creati...
I use no commercial reuse (NC) yet years ago a polite young man from China emailed me letting me know that he was translating my stuff to resell under his name for money. To be honest, I didn’t mind and it made a good story to tell friends and family.
Is the concern that anybody will be earning money on your software (just that), or that you won't get any money, or that they will earn money and don't give back the code?
If the company earns money and opens the code, is that OK for you?
Just for you and for everyone information, Richard Stallman himself told people not only to sell their own software, but the software written by others as well!
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
AGPL, just as all other GPL, does not prohibit selling the software. If you goal is to make your software unsellable, please use your own licensing terms (there's nothing wrong with that!!!)
A “conflict” is intended to mean the case that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
aka: the compatible licenses do not put additional restrictions, so no, it is not MPL.
also, from the license:
> this Distribution or Communication can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence..
So you are allowed distribution, not relicensing.
To simplify It seems to me that:
* GPL will automatically make something GPL.
* EUPL will automatically make something selectively dual-licensing. parts EUPL, parts whatever.
Also do note that EUPL is the first license to explicitly state that any issues fall under EU(Belgium) law, so EU has the last say on its license.
In the last year I have started vibe coding a lot, but I still take personal ownership of my latest code examples because I set requirements and provide a design, and ask AI coding harnesses to let me run and test the code so I tweak it. Anyway, it still feels like mostly my code and I prefer the new AI + Mark code over what I used to produce.
This has been a strange ride! I learned to program in 1965 and have always loved coding, but it is a weird new world we live in, my friend.
The poster child for this is chromium which is GPL because it has clear and obvious roots in the old KHTML code of 20 some years ago. In theory you can contribute to Google movement and I suppose some people do but realistically Google controls it completely and they will do whatever they want. even though the source is available it is effectively not a contribution back.
The chrome example actually proves my point, the KDE project, or anyone for that matter, can take the changes Google made to their code. If KHTML was MIT it's likely that wouldn't be the case
If you frame the licensing space as for either personal or commercial use, perhaps your point of view makes sense, but this is not a useful framing for most people, and it is specifically not something the open source community cares about.
If you wish to keep leverage over others then you do not wish to have them compete with you on the same product. That is a valid position to have, but it is squarely on the non-free part of the licensing spectrum. You don't want to play within the open source community and they don't want to play with you. All anyone owe others is to make that clear.
They were attacked by OSI zealots every time because it's not real open source. Which is true, but the unsaid - or well, only sometimes mentioned - other half is that these open source enthusiasts would you rather have a bog standard all-rights-reserved commercial licence than a relatively open licence without the four freedoms!
I can't claim to read other people's thoughts, but my hunch is that this happens because it's too "close" to an open source licence so they view it as competition, while they view commercial software as either a straightforward enemy or they don't care about it whatsoever.
The history aside, this approach just makes the open source community more and more irrelevant each day, especially with the advent of "vibecode your own dependencies up". The 4 freedoms come from a place where they were about users, but gigantic corporations have shoehorned themselves into being users, and instead of the community defending against it, they think the freedom to exploit the maintainers' work while contributing nothing back is more important than keeping the commons free and shared. :P
Only siths think in absolutes.
I find this much simpler to understand than AGPL/LGPL or the linked EUPL.
You can also just do a crayon license. "All rights reserved, noncommercial use allowed." Nobody's stopping you. If and when Debian wants to ship your package, ask them for proper legal advice about changing it, they have lawyers.
AGPL is a different matter because companies are unsure of the boundaries between their own proprietary code and any AGPL code they're using.
A “conflict” here is intended to mean that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
Also relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596403
And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.
Use an AGPL license if you like but--and I'm not even a lawyer--but I'll probably just walk away. Your software is probably not that interesting to compensate for any risk.
For media, 3D files, game FX, and icons it is only CC0 Public Domain projects we recommend to folks having fun. Keeping track of every Copyright and Copyleft trolls content demands is just too much work for small hobbies. =3
We also financially support people clearing barriers for future artists and creatives (clean Blender resources.)
And procedural textures with bake export (actually made Blender usable for mere mortals):
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary
One of the problems we found was people reselling other peoples pirated works, or plug-ins for features already in Blender for free. Cons will always con regardless of community intentions. Make something fun and beautiful instead =3
I really don't understand what your goal would be in releasing code at all, then.
I release the code so that people and companies that feel like contributing to the community can use it. Companies that want to take without giving back however are mildly inconvenienced by copyleft.
Having a less restrictive FOSS compatible license that doesn't obligate people to modify the general purpose libraries for their edge case has proven important.
GPL only truly makes sense if targeting an OS supporting shared-object library paradigms. This is part of the reason why 95% of commercial Applications are running in an emulated/wrapper on the nix platforms.
The year of the Linux Desktop is still a ways off, and the foundational library structures are under constant upgrade or permutation. Snap/Flatpak/AppImage and Docker/RancherVM were all designed to try and mitigate the compatibility chaos of perpetual nix Beta release cultures.
It has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages similar to the Butterfly Effect bugs when something with the same name slightly changes behavior. =3
Why does it have to be forced? Why can't murder just be legal and if you want to murder that's fine and if you don't, that's fine too...
It was not forced charity from the original author. They were free to choose any license. The original author is the only one in the position to choose to be charitable or not. No one else's opinion on charity matters.
Rather being thoughtful and principled enough to choose a copyleft license is the truest charity of all and the most valuable for all other consumers forever after.
It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
If I get something from you and the only terms are not money but simply attribute and share-alike, that is not some burden.
That's like saying the only terms are you can have this for free and you can use it for any purpose you want, but just promise not to punch me in the face. "What? Outrageous! It's totally unreasonable to make it a condition enforced by law that I can't punch you in the face and still take your stuff."
I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical.
>It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage.
I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand end users give up freedoms to meet a selfish ideal.
If someone wants to control how people use their stuff, than just stop calling it a FOSS work. Some seem very passionate about the subject, but I don't think anyone has ever been murdered over shitty code. =3
Ok buddy whatever you say.
These arguments are so ridiculously invalid I'll trade you a Clockwork Orange for a "not even wrong" suggested google.
Talk about "passionate about the subject" indeed.
Because for me, it would be the exact other way round.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
- BUSL is OSI-approved and listed in SPDX, so corporate lawyers won't be scared away by it: https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html
- With BUSL the restriction is revenue-based. You can still create competing products, but would have to pay a licensing fee.
Debian FSG compatible No
FSF approved No
OSI approved No
GPL compatible No
Copyleft NoOf course it isn‘t.
You think it's just awful? Ok.
Patent claim sections are the only legal part at the end of the document, and may only cover functional or process facets of an innovation. Software patents are also only valid in certain jurisdictions.
Generally speaking, if something has been time-stamped in the public domain you can challenge a patent for $2k. Since a global patent is around $240k to $600k each, most people would not want to take that bet with archive.org active.
The Patent first-to-file changes under the US system may have altered the 17 organizations disclosure limit rules, but as far back as I can recall any patented technology older than 19 years is almost certainly public domain. =3
I did even get a check once from a magazine but it was Canadian so that was very cute. (Sorry to any Canadians in the audience.)
But there are a lot of, often unclear, rules related to publicity and model rights that are by no means clear across geographies. Even leaving aside Eiffel Tower light displays, I'm sure a lot of the photos I've taken in Europe and put up on Flickr or Facebook could be an issue if someone really wanted to pursue it. Organizations do often have disclaimers as part of event registrations as well but they're pretty pro-forma and a lawyer could probably argue that there was no meeting of the minds in any contract.
> I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I want to help other people, then giving them the means to do what they want with no real restrictions is "the opposite" of that?
> Companies that want to take without giving back
So this is not about helping anyone else, but about mandating a behavior, even if that behavior is "pay it forward".
It is why the wxWidgets has a license that allows creating monolithic commercial blob dependent binaries for Windows, Linux Gtk/X11, and MacOS.
https://wxwidgets.org/about/licence/
People should not static link GPL/LGPL code to closed source blobs, and expect copyright/copyleft trolls to leave their project violating licenses. =3
This is sometimes impossible with mystery binary blobs from manufacturers. =3
From a pure engineering reliability perspective, coupling your technology choice to your vendor gives that vendor too much leverage (as we've seen with, for example, VMware).
This isn't about defending the big companies at all. It's about defending the right of hosting providers to compete on hosting a variety of software. In the alternative world of entirely commercial licenses, or entirely BUSL-styled licenses, you would be shackled to the specific vendors that happened to create the technology that you wanted to leverage. This is a scenario where the customer invariably loses.
Let's not get everything mixed up here - I singled out BUSL exactly because it does not prevent competing services, especially at small scale. In fact it would encourage small business and individual usage vs big cloud providers. It also has a conversion clause, so worst case scenario you have a slightly outdated MIT-licensed release to pick up from.
The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
That said, indeed it might not be an ideal choice for that kind of cloud-hosted software if you want to maximize adoption.
To support sibling comment: no it doesn't?
But your point about the revenue cut off in the BUSL is worthwhile (assuming we're talking about a licensor that is leveraging the additional use grant). I just disagree that it's a remedy because it basically punishes a business for being successful, by changing the rules upon which it was built. I'd be very curious to hear of anybody who has licensed software under the BUSL and has ended up getting a license from companies that meet those revenue thresholds.
It's worth noting that the BUSL, by default, with no additional use grant, prohibits the use of the software in production. So I actually think you have the two licenses reversed. The BUSL prohibits production use and competing services by default unless an additional use grant is specified and then it is only allowed under the revenue threshold specified in the additional use grant.
The AGPL has no prohibition whatsoever on the deployment of competing services.
FOSS is a great answer to the first few questions, but it fails at the last one. As a user, yes, I would prefer a cloud-protection license, if it means that software will still be developed in a few years time. It's not like I want to use this software to compete with the author, I'm happy not to be allowed to do that.
I used to work for a very open source-friendly company and, while AGPL wasn't broadly verbotten and I can't quote any publicly available documents, its use was not encouraged in general. (And outside of Linux which was what it was, permissive licenses became much more common for new projects.)
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.
Or, for a revenue threshold:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.
That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.
The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].
That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.
[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
1. BUSL does not allow production use. Additional Use Grant (optional) is necessary to allow this, and is typcially accompanied by a revenue limit, setting a trap for any business that attempts to use it by changing the rules as they become more successful.
2. The AGPL does allow production use, by default, forever, but requires you publish associated source code when providing the service.
Only one of these licenses bans production use, and that's the BUSL. It can be modified to allow it under certain circumstances, but your original statement, that BUSL allows production use and AGPL prohibits it, is exactly reversed.