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Every so often I run through the common set of licenses to double-check which one I want to personally use for my projects (both commercial and for fun), and I always end up back at AGPL. For me, it just strikes the right balance between open-source and restricting corporations from disproportionately profiting off of my labor.
Correction: they chose AGPL with a poison pill (CLA) so they can benefit from it and take it away whenever they want more.
> The AGPL license permits free use, modification, and distribution of software, provided that distributed, derivative works of the software are released under the same license. Here is the rub: free software permits unconditional use. The GPL without the A, or MIT or BSD licenses are not EULAs; they place restrictions or conditions on redistribution, not on use. (With regard to use, they have only certain liability…
> The AGPL restricts use; it is an EULA: end-user license agreement. The antithesis of free software. This is a common misconception about Free software. It's not about freedom of its users or authors, it's freedom of the actual code to be available for others. For example, MIT license allows users to take the code and modify it without releasing modifications. This traps the new version of the software, possibly for…
The original MIT-licensed program continues to exist and be available regardless of the proprietary versions and embeddings.
A copyleft license just asserts, using copyright power, that such things should not exist.
MIT and BSD licenses just allow certain works to legally exist that copyleft advocates think should not exist. The copyleft is concerned with squelching the existence of things, whereas the MIT and BSD licenses mostly promote existence.
(They are concerned with squelching the existence of plagiarism: an author's name and copyright notice removed from the source code work, and possibly replaced with another. Also, squelching the situation where the compiled work is accompanied by documentation which neglect to give attribution to the presence of that BSD-licensed code.)
The point of an OSS license in these kinds of situations is pretty simple: They need to pick a license which is salty enough so that big corporations cannot use it, but have to buy a special license from the authors. Meanwhile they can support and benefit from the open source community without bureaucracy, and get a maximal userbase to create content on the web about this stack, and have a maximal number of people wh…
Correction: they chose AGPL with a poison pill (CLA) so they can benefit from it and take it away whenever they want more.
Their github repo just says AGPL 3.0. Can you point me to the other constraining terms are? This would be quite interesting (like the "Open Core" people). And when I say "interesting" I don't mean a positive feature.
> In order for us, Retake, Inc. (dba ParadeDB) to accept patches and other contributions from you, you need to adopt our ParadeDB Contributor License Agreement (the "CLA"). The current version of the CLA can be found here.
https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb/blob/6b829681190684f241...
> You hereby grant to the Company and to recipients of software distributed by the Company a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.
> The AGPL license permits free use, modification, and distribution of software, provided that distributed, derivative works of the software are released under the same license. Here is the rub: free software permits unconditional use. The GPL without the A, or MIT or BSD licenses are not EULAs; they place restrictions or conditions on redistribution, not on use. (With regard to use, they have only certain liability…
It does not. You can absolutely host AGPL software as a service, you just have to share any modifications you made with those that use the service.
Correction: they chose AGPL with a poison pill (CLA) so they can benefit from it and take it away whenever they want more.
The only concern then is ethical - will the developer be monetarily compensated if the product makes money? I believe they should be. Other open source developers may disagree.
Note also that for a commercial open source project, a CLA can offer some legal protection - by signing a CLA a developer declares that they own the copyright on the code, which reduces the liability of the commercial venture behind the open source product if someone contributes "pirated" code.
Correction: they chose AGPL with a poison pill (CLA) so they can benefit from it and take it away whenever they want more.
Note that they can't "take it away" completely. The AGPL ensures that the community AGPL licensed code will always have to be open source, and that anybody else can use it too. So a developer who has contributed to an AGPL codebase cannot be denied access to it. Due to the AGPL license, any code will always be open source and thus the CLA cannot claim exclusivity over the contributed code and prevent its (re)use by t…
> The AGPL license permits free use, modification, and distribution of software, provided that distributed, derivative works of the software are released under the same license. Here is the rub: free software permits unconditional use. The GPL without the A, or MIT or BSD licenses are not EULAs; they place restrictions or conditions on redistribution, not on use. (With regard to use, they have only certain liability…
AGPL doesn't restrict use: "You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their github repo just says AGPL 3.0. Can you point me to the other constraining terms are? This would be quite interesting (like the "Open Core" people). And when I say "interesting" I don't mean a positive feature.
The project is licensed under AGPL, but outside contributors have to sign away their rights with CLA if they wish to contribute to the main project. It's in CONTRIBUTING.md [1] > In order for us, Retake, Inc. (dba ParadeDB) to accept patches and other contributions from you, you need to adopt our ParadeDB Contributor License Agreement (the "CLA"). The current version of the CLA can be found here. https://github.com/p…
"In order for us, Retake, Inc. (dba ParadeDB) to accept patches and other contributions from you, you need..." makes it sound like their hands are tied, you must assign copyright, there's no other option.
In reality, this is a (contributor-hostile) choice they made. They could have made different ones.