Why we picked AGPL

Steal from the users of the software, yes. It's not about developers, it was never really about developers if we're talking copyleft licenses.

> Straight from the gnu's mouth! > > "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."

That gnu's mouth spoke 3 other clauses, and finished up with:

> A program is free software if it gives users adequately *all* of these freedoms. [emphasis mine]

>> But the purpose of the AGPL has nothing to do with people using the software in ways that the license chooser doesn't like > > Yes it is. If you wrote a network program, and you specifically don't like the idea that someone can modify it and then host that modified version for users without letting them have the source code, then the AGPL is a tool that nicely expresses your intent.

Ok, let's stick with "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose". We're talking about running the software here, not modifying it or hosting it. You can run the program as you wish. For any purpose -- what purpose are you claiming is disallowed? "For the purpose of running it on my server without giving out my changes" is not about running it, that's about something incurred as a result of running it. Which is unfortunate, I agree; it would be nicer if all obligations were only incurred when distributing it. But that still doesn't restrict the running part.

But never mind, this is too much of a semantic argument at this point. I was trying to understand why the AGPL bothers you more than the GPL. I get the argument that it triggers a condition based on usage rather than distribution, but given that the condition does not restrict the usage, I'm not sure why you care. Is it a principle? I agree that it feels a little messy, but given my understanding of the core goal of copyleft licenses, it actually feels to me to be pretty close to a minimal encroachment beyond the GPL that still satisfies the original goal of the GPL for server-side software.

> For instance, the GPL has turned out to very nicely suit corporate interests. The copyright holder of a GPLed software component has a competitive edge over the licensees. They have to abide by the license and release all their changes, which you can help yourself to; meanwhile, you can have a proprietary version in parallel.

Yeah, and my previous message didn't adequately cover this part. AGPL+CLA has a purpose and expresses an intent beyond the intent behind GPL. I'm personally more concerned with the evolution of the software I and others release, even if I find this corporate usage of the AGPL somewhat fascinating. If I understand correctly, your philosophical objections to the AGPL aren't based on this corporate scenario either, though?

You care about restrictions on usage and want as few restrictions as possible, so a corporation building upon BSD code internally without releasing changes doesn't bother you. But AGPL does bother you, because that corporation (or any other user) would need to consider the requirements of running that code. Do I have that right? (Or strictly speaking, running and modifying the code, since there are no requirements placed upon just running it if you haven't changed anything.)

> You can fork it and use it in and as free software forever. This is only 'unreasonable' if you're a proprietary software vendor. The complaint of a proprietary software vendor strikes me as somewhat ironic here: what, the same deal that you give to your own customers for your own product is one you simply 'can't' take yourself because it's not 'reasonable'?

I am not discussing ethics or morality here, just practicality, and yes, from the perspective of a user that is not primarily releasing open source. Note that it's somewhat different and more general than your characterization. I might be in another business, not software, but unwilling to touch AGPL within my infrastructure due to risk of virality. Strictly speaking, I am not a "proprietary software vendor" as I am not even in the software business, primarily. Nevertheless, your general point stands.

I am not arguing it is bad. Simply that I would not characterize AGPL+CLA as "no vendor lock-in because open source." I put it right in the bucket of e.g. Oracle proprietary database. I am not saying it is bad or totally unreasonable. I just don't buy up the marketing koolaid.

> Firstly, you are wrong. The FSF does not require copyright assignment. It is up to the individual software projects to decide if they require them or not.

The FSF requires copyright assignment for many (possibly no longer all?) of their own projects, e.g. GnuTLS. Of course it's up to an individual project whether it requires it (how could the FSF possibly control what some unrelated project does?), but on those projects that the FSF themselves run (or at least many of them, and traditionally it was all of them), they require it.

> The FSF is in the unique position in that the FSF could change the GPL if they wanted to. If you use the GPL/AGPL, the FSF is inherently trustworthy;

They cannot change the GPL. They can publish new version of it, and recommend that you license your project with a term that permits it to be used under those new versions, but this is not obligatory (and notably e.g. the Linux kernel does not).

> If software were uncopyrightable, they would still be binaries without source code, which you would have to reverse engineer to find out what harm they perpetrate actively or possibly through their security flaws.

True. But reverse engineering could happen openly, and tooling for it would improve. The benefits would outweigh the costs.

> if you wrote a piece of free source code, anyone could do anything with it they wish, including removing your name, and not attributing you in any way in the documentation accompanying the compiled code.

Depends where you are. Many jurisdictions recognise attribution as a "moral right" separate from copyright.

> A program is not distributed to you if someone else installed it on a machine you don't own and you're just borrowing that machine. It doesn't matter if you're physically at the console, we're at a remote dumb terminal or smart client. The program was distributed to your school, company or friend or whoever.

Up to a point. If you pressed the "buy" button, paid the money, and are using it from your machine like a program, then it shouldn't matter where it's metaphysically located. Plenty of software will "phone home" to company servers or even falsely claim to be running computation on the company's machines (SimCity), but that doesn't mean the software hasn't been distributed to you. Just as the courts don't allow you to stream TV from an OTA capture card in a remote datacenter and consider that to be OTA viewing, having a program that you use from your local machine do some of its execution in some remote datacenter (whether through VNC-style remote access, a web UI, or something else) shouldn't make it any less your program that's been distributed to you and that you're using.