[ocdtrekkie]

It's worth noting that Crate isn't contesting that SSPL is a perfectly legitimate open source license, it's the GPL part that's the issue for them.

GPL and AGPL are just as much used to "poison the well" for potential competitors to a product also released as open source, and dual licensing strategies are a well-known part of open source businesses. This hasn't changed with SSPL at all, there's just a lot of pearl-clutching about the fact that the high and mighty OSI has not signed off on it.

[Pet_Ant]

> GPL and AGPL are just as much used to "poison the well"

But it is also legitimately outside of the purpose as well... unlike the SSPL. The Linux kernel for example. No one has ever looked at the SSPL and said “I want to work on that project” unlike the the GPL, which I believe is the GP’s point.

> There is no one on the planet yet who has agreed that they will run a project under the SS Public License and be themselves bound by the SS Public License.

[ocdtrekkie]

Many of the people who are enthusiasts for the GPL should be similarly enthusiastic about the copyleft protections afforded by the SSPL. It, like the GPL, discourages commercial use by encouraging users of the software to open source any software they want to build on top of this software.

RMS would not be upset that the GPL poisons the well because companies don't want to open source their code, RMS would say they are denying user freedoms by failing to open source their code. The SSPL merely builds on this.

The only real sticking point here seems to be the OSI, and probably some manner of lobbying by tech firms to keep the SSPL from being accepted more widely as an open source license.

[xorcist]

> like the GPL, discourages commercial use

Comments of this sort was comme il faut in the 90s. But now, more than two decades later, GPL has proven its commercial value so many times over it's hard to take such arguments seriously.

Tit-for-tat business models grow faster than those staking out islands. Linux won. We need to move on from this.

[ocdtrekkie]

By "discourages commercial use", I refer to the very-real-today fact that plenty of organizations won't touch GPL or especially AGPL code because of the copyleft restrictions. This is largely the same for SSPL.

Amazon could use SSPL-licensed Elasticsearch on AWS, if they wanted to open source AWS, and they'd probably still make bank on it. But they don't want to, so hence going to SSPL, like GPL, discourages their use.

[2Gkashmiri]

Isnt sspl just agpl with "addtional" requirement only if you are a cloud service provider just for the benefit of their users? If am an end user of say Amazon, am I not getting more freedoms with respect to the source code of Amazon stack? Isnt that GPL is supposed to provide ?

[ocdtrekkie]

"If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License."

Doesn't particularly specify what type of business you have to be running, though it's obviously partially related to whatever type of software you licensed under the SSPL.

The GPL affects projects which embed GPL code into them, and the SSPL effectively does the same, it just draws the borders wider, to anything used to provide it as a service to others. In a copyleft sense, that promotes providers of it to also contribute to the ecosystem of tools around it.

[2Gkashmiri]

I dont think GPL forces anyone to contribute upstream. I am asking about the idea of freedom the end user enjoys with GPL code. Does sspl build on it, give more freedom to end user or restrict that freedom. If it gives more freedom, isnt that a good thing ? Why should people be up with pitchforks ?