| The field-of-endeavor and persons-or-groups discrimination arguments don't stand up. They just sound nice if you want to knock the license. If SSPL discriminates against a "field of endeavor" that is making proprietary software, or against "persons or groups" that are proprietary software developers, all copyleft licenses do. That was the point. Here's Richard Stallman on the GPL: > I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html The quote from Fedora perfectly encapsulates the difference between the OSI review process as people perceive it and the OSI review process as it really was. Are we judging license terms, or what we believe to have been in the secret heart of the company that wrote them? What happens when someone else uses the license, as when independent hackers choose GPL, or startups choose AGPL? Commercial software makers have plenty to fear from GPL, AGPL, and other open source copyleft licenses, because so many of their business models entail slurping up other people's open code, but not sharing their own. Those licenses prohibit building proprietary software with open code, just not if you happen to "compose" a service with network API calls, rather than build a program by copying code snippets, using frameworks, and linking libraries. |