Toward Copyleft Equality for All
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Toward Copyleft Equality for All
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#2This reminded me of the agreement between Qt and KDE, where if Qt is ever made proprietary, KDE can publish Qt under the BSD license:
http://www.olafsw.de/a-better-qt-because-of-open-source-and-... https://old.reddit.com/r/QtFramework/comments/e9376a/trouble... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755337
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#3Two standout points from this essay:
1. I've long heard that various SaaS companies really didn't like the Affero General Public License. Kuhn makes a case for why this is a validly justified concern, something I'd not previously considered.
2. The copyleft restriction termination is a really interesting concept, though not without its own set of consequences which should be closely examined. Historically, the advantage of copyleft has been that it applies equally to all. The abuse of it (by firms also marketing properietary solutions) is a problem, but removing copyleft obligations entirely might not go as intended.
3. Copyright assignments to copylefted codebases without an explicit restriction of those to require copyleft-only usage, a distinction which differentiates strongly between the uses at, say, FSF vs. MySQL AG / Oracle, clearly also present issues, as has long been argued.
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#4I'm torn. On one side I do like this idea, on the other hand I don't see a practical way to work on exploratory open source software in some areas where your effort (even if it actually ends up delivering value to somebody) will be rewarded adequately. The existing models (open core, support contracts, donations, ...) may work here and there (although some of those would be invalidated by this suggestion), but compared to a traditional strategy just writing proprietary code it's quite a bit more difficult to make money. And I reckon that is difficult enough as it is...
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#5I'm torn. On one side I do like this idea, on the other hand I don't see a practical way to work on exploratory open source software in some areas where your effort (even if it actually ends up delivering value to somebody) will be rewarded adequately. The existing models (open core, support contracts, donations, ...) may work here and there (although some of those would be invalidated by this suggestion), but compar…
I don't think anyone suggested that it should be easy to make money that way. It was and likely will always be more difficult. Which doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#6The premise of this post is that dual-licensing --- offering a piece of serverside or on-prem commercial software under (A)GPL terms, with a proprietary license available for firms that want unrestricted usage --- is "seedy". It's not clear to me how that premise is justified, and Kuhn's claim that the model has failed to increase software freedom seems totally unjustified.
At the heart of Kuhn's argument about "seediness" seems to be CLAs, which is where a third-party developer using software under FOSS terms is asked to sign the rights to their modifications over to the original vendor. If CLAs were coercive, this would indeed be seedy: FOSS developers would be getting baited into contributing to commercial products. But CLAs aren't coercive; the AGPL requires only that you meet the requirements of the license itself, not that you sign away your rights to your own modifications. People sign CLAs because they want their modifications upstreamed, and to avoid maintaining forks, not because they're legally required to do so.
Meanwhile, the kinds of software we talk about when we talk about the AGPL are overwhelmingly things that used to be (and in some cases in large part still are) closed source proprietary products. It's a little hard to imagine a closed source distributed database taking off in 2020; 20-30 years ago, to use Kuhn's framing, the opposite statement would have been more valid.
Fundamentally, software offered under the AGPL is almost always developed under the model of a single commercial vendor doing most of the heavy lifting, and, usually, all of the initial lift in getting a piece of software to the point of viability. It's hard to see how these vendors are taking something from the community by releasing their products under the AGPL when their alternatives would certainly be either a fully closed-source proprietary release, or no release at all. Kuhn writes as if licensing and advocacy decisions determine the economics of software development, but if the last 30 years has been an experiment conclusively demonstrating anything, it's that --- at least for the kinds of serverside code we're talking about --- no matter how you license it, companies paying software developers are what gets software built.
I have strong opinions only about the AGPL; I don't pretend to fully understand the ramifications of MongoDB's SS GPL, nor do I support the SS GPL unreservedly.
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#7> The essence in non-legalese is this: If you offer a license that isn't a copyleft license, the copyleft provisions collapse and the software is now available to all under a non-copyleft, hyper-permissive FOSS license.
Why would anyone choose this?
It must be for the sake of giving the downstream users some sort of assurance that a Bad Thing won't happen to them, as a sort of promise.
"If we ever commercialize this, we will give all of you the opportunity to do the same."
It seems that the only authors for whom it would make sense to choosing this license would be authors who have no intention of going mixed proprietary licensing now, or in the future. Moreover, authors who believe in copyleft FOSS licenses and want to keep the project that way.
Someone who chooses that license knowing they will likely issue proprietary versions might as well skip straight to a simpler BSD-style license that is implied in that action.
Someone who doesn't believe in copyleft FOSS would also just skip this sort of thing and give the users the "hyper-permissive" license.
No matter what promises a copyright holder makes, they can retract them. However, at least this will be in force for users who hold existing copies. So that is to say, if the authors decide to commercialize and switch to Affero GPL, then only the new issues of the software going forward will be bound by that AGPL; the existing users will have the "hyper-permissive" license for the code up to that point.
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#8> The toxicity of this business model has only become apparent in hindsight.
I'm glad that Bradley is drawing critical attention to this issue.
> efforts to draft even more restrictive software copyleft licenses
A non-free "copyleft" license is not worthy of the name and is a problem because it is non-free, not because of "copyleft".
> The clause still needs work
The license needs work,it seems to treat copyleft as a form of punishment for authors to be tolerated for a while rather than as a strategy to permanently protect the freedom of all software users.
> a basic approach to incorporating similar copyleft equality clauses into written exceptions for existing copyleft licenses, such as the Affero GPL
These clauses can and will be removed by downstream users for any alterations or additions they make to the software in order to provide it to their cloud-based users. This will redouble the downstream use dynamics that VC-funded "open source" projects, some of the heaviest users of abusive CLAs, whine about.
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#9Two standout points from this essay: 1. I've long heard that various SaaS companies really didn't like the Affero General Public License. Kuhn makes a case for why this is a validly justified concern, something I'd not previously considered. 2. The copyleft restriction termination is a really interesting concept, though not without its own set of consequences which should be closely examined. Historically, the advant…
That Affero license doesn't seem very useful, because if you depend on code running on someone else's server, it doesn't help you if you have an honest copy of the source code that is actually running on it. You still don't control it. You can't make changes and deploy it to that server, or update it yourself, etc..
Free, open-source software is about control: controlling what code manipulates your data.
In short, it seems that the license really doesn't really do much of substance for the user, and just saddles the operator with extra burdens.
Re: Toward Copyleft Equality for All
#10I believe that this is arguing from a false premise: the reason that companies despise the AGPL is not, I think, that they fear that they fear accidentally violating copyleft and thus being forced to buy a proprietary license but rather than they simply want to have their cake and eat it too: copyleft for thee but not for me. They want to use software for free but not grant the rights they received to their own users.
Thus a provision reverting to a BSD-style license in case of proprietary licensing would, I believe, do nothing to encourage them to use it in the first place.