It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.
It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.
About the part on SaaS, the outcry is solely because the licences used by those projects weren’t approved neither by OSI or the FSF, they have clauses that specifically affect the economic aspect, and that can never fit in with either movement, but it is exactly that problem that the software authors want to tackle, preventing big corporations that already have the means to deliver a large scale service based on their software from making even more money than they already have, even if those corporations published possible modifications, the author would benefit little, because they most likely won’t have the infrastructure to run it on at the same scale and profiting from it.
Hot take: the real issue there is that those authors clearly don’t care for free software, because if they did, they’d have started off with AGPL or the like, instead they choose MIT exactly because of the possible economic prospect for themselves, when at some point they could implement vendor lock-in by baiting the users into believing that it was a community-run project at the start. Don’t get me wrong, they deserve to be paid for what they do, and corporations dropping by to profit from all that hard work feels wrong (but not illegal, and so it is fair), but exploiting the visibility and help of the community to reach popularity and credibility and eventually going private is a major dick move
For your second part:
A lot of open source projects exist to make people’s lives easier at work. The people developing these projects are often also people who have jobs as devs and have a use for the projects. It just so happens that it’s easier to use these libraries at work and share them with others when they’re more permissively licensed, and there are community benefits when people all contribute back to it.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go the AGPL route and forcing everyone into open source, but that makes it much harder to use these tools at work, which often kills the motivation behind building them in the first place.
I tend to be of the opinion that community tools should be GPL/AGPL, while libraries can be anything. It works as a compromise for both - so devs can have an easier time at work while also forcing contributions back to community-developed tools.
Edit: I should also mention dual licensed AGPL/paid commercial. That model is probably my favorite, but unfortunately uncommon.
Fully agreed, though I must say this, if you truly believe in the spirit of free software and, let’s also be honest and add, can afford not to bend for the convenience of others (maybe you get funded through donations and/or grants), then you have the opportunity to make a piece of software so good, be it application or library, that it’ll be hard for competition to come up with something better and proprietary, that’s how it is for those instances where companies were sued for using them and not providing the source, e.g. Linux and John Deere is the last I remember.
It is that nature of copyleft that the more it spreads, the more it will enable for a culture shift, when people are faced with the inevitable conflict of the idea of keeping everything behind closed doors and not being allowed to if they want to take the easy way out, they might give it an actual thought or they’ll try to be unfair and use without giving back, showing their true greedy colours. I’m not a purist by any means, as much as I’d like to, but that is the kind of world I’d like to live in