211–220 of 312 posts
The AGPL is great, even for business. I make a living from AGPL software. Lots of people generally don't like it, because AGPL was not written to please the largest number of developers, but rather to protect the basic software freedoms of end-users. In a sense, the AGPL guarantees more freedoms, is more free, than other licenses such as MIT/BSD for end-users. But depends on the point of view. Many developers don’t l…
"freedom to steal"?
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Blog author here. I couldn't agree more. Thank you for your kind words and for sharing the academic perspective of using the AGPL - super interesting!
I'm a fan of AGPL as well, but there's a point of possible confusion for GNU license variants I personally run in to and maybe others as well. It may be worth specifying which variant of the AGPL you are using, e.g. AGPL-3.0-only or AGPL-3.0-or-later.
I love the AGPL. I can't imagine it becoming popular for generic business functionality in library form, but for highly-specialized libraries (in my case scientific with industrial applications) it was everything I was looking for --- not least because automated license scanners flag it and scare potential parasites away. It's also a great choice for complete pieces of software (such as DBs, as in this case) to offer…
I have no experience with the AGPL, but I really really like the idea of it. However, I get worried when I read takes like Hector Martin's [1]. In essence, he argues that it becomes very easy for the end-user to make even the most trivial of modifications to AGPL code or stuff associated to it and accidentally violate the license's quine requirement. Do you have any insight on this? [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/737708
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Using code that is freely given is not in any sense stealing.
Only if you think taking the work of others and profiting from it without contributing anything back is fine.
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But you forgot to cite the next sentence: The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work. So, what is 'covered work'? The license says this: A "covered work" means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program. Do you still think it's clearly written license? To me it's dubious enough that I wanted an explicit answer f…
>Do you still think it's clearly written license? Fyi... a few Google employees talked about similar ambiguous interpretations of AGPL's terms and clauses by Google's legal team review in a past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966778
> Perhaps if random engineers stopped calling legal opinion FUD and falsehoods and took a moment to listen to the feedback from lawyers who didn’t write the license, we’d get somewhere with finding a palatable license for all parties. Instead, we get a holy war.
My corollary: an argument is not a document. When I need a strong resolution on an issue, I want in writing and in a single organized voice, not spread across a bunch of comments and commenters, whose goal is often to shout down doubts or to keep the peace between participants.
Besides the internet, I've seen "the-argument-is-the-document" occasionally inside companies and very strongly in a hype-driven programming language.
I don't know about ParadeDB, but this was very off-putting for me in case of Minio when they switched to AGPL. If you check their answers to various license questions, they are essentially this: if you use Minio in your stack/product (for profit), then we recommend our commercial license or consult with a lawyer if your use case is covered by AGPL or not. What me and I guess many others wanted was a simple yes/no to…
This feels like dealing with government agencies where you go out of your way to get clarification to make sure you are doing everything correctly, but they refuse to give a clear answer to they can bother you about it later.