| I could argue a completely different case. The only "restriction" it is placing on you is that you may not restrict anyone else from exercising the same rights that you yourself were granted by the license, which I believe is the original spirit of the 4 freedoms and the GPL family of licenses. The software is "effectively free," because for every user who simply uses it for personal use, research, or even many forms of commercial use, they have all of the same abilities that they would have with any other free software license. The restriction only comes in when you make a derived work of the software and do not pay forward that derived work under equivalent licensing terms as the work on which it was based. And this is where the real disagreement is. What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand? If I'm essentially selling access to somebody else's software, I have little doubt that access software constitutes as a derived work. I think it's fair that a license like the SSPL asks me to release the code which provides access to the free software as free software itself. Suggesting that "My freedoms are being restricted" because a licensing term prevents you from restricting the freedom of others is the same argument that "permissive" license proponents argue against strong copyleft licenses. If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it. |
> What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?
This is mostly determined by copyright law, since "derived work" is a legal term of art.
> If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.
This is the justification, but due to the design of the license it is de-facto impossible to actually comply with its requirements. Therefore it acts as a de-facto proprietary license. Many copyleft lawyers have stated that the license would likely require you to re-license Linux under the SSPL if you run SSPL code on a Linux server. This is not possible to do, and thus you are forced to pay MongoDB to get a business license.
Maybe there is a place for a license like the SSPL, but given how there would be effectively no company that could comply with it (even if it didn't require relicensing to SSPL, many companies have contracted code that they cannot relicense to a free software license) I fear it would have the same effect.