[jrv]

That sounds nice in theory, but the reality is also that a lot of more permissively licensed (BSD / Apache) projects now cannot use (most) parts of Grafana / Loki / Tempo anymore, since realistically they won't be able to or want to switch to the AGPL as well (because of all the pain that would incur on others, in turn). That means that basically the whole free code sharing idea goes out of the window, at least in one direction – Grafana can of course still integrate code from more permissively licensed projects into their codebase.

[Seirdy]

That's kind of the point. The purpose of MIT/BSD is to enable nonfree derivative works; the purpose of the AGPL is to only allow free derivatives. AGPL maximizes freedom by prohibiting further restriction of it; it's a local maxima of "user freedom" as a function of "developer freedom".

If you want to use AGPL software in your project, you're free to relicense under AGPL.

[josephcsible]

I agree with the substance of what you said, but I'm going to nitpick a bit of wording: what you call "developer freedom" isn't freedom at all, and is more rightly called power.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html

[clusterfish]

That seems like splitting hairs for ideological gain.

You might as well describe freedom of movement as power to take someone else's job in another town, or freedom of speech as power to manipulate masses, or freedom to do an abortion as power over the unborn child. Which way the issues are framed says more about the author than the issue.

Software has leverage (one developer, many users at low marginal cost) built-in, but that doesn't make developing non-(A)GPL or even proprietory software a projection of developer's power. Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power.

At the same time, copyleft doesn't come free (ha), as developers who need to earn a living will choose to work on problems where they can actually extract some profit to compensate for their effort. Not everyone is keen to work for free, or work as much / as hard for free as they would if they could make a living off it. So yes you might get free-er software, but less of it.

[moron4hire]

> That seems like splitting hairs for ideological gain.

Such is the way of the FSF.

[Seirdy]

Laws exist ideally to limit freedoms whose exercise comes with externalities that end up reducing the freedom for others. These range from freedoms to cause harm to others (steal, assault, enslave), to freedoms to sell food without disclosing ingredients, to freedoms to run a business without transparently reporting financial information. The idea of greater freedoms depending on lesser restrictions is not novel.

> Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power.

Copyleft/FLOSS alone is a necessary but insufficient measure; I wrote about other measures in a blog post [0].

[0]: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...

TLDR: open platforms/standards-driven and implementation-neutral development, implementation diversity, and simplicity are also necessary. Once all that is accomplished, you have a platform that prevents abuse of power: anyone can use any implementation they want, and implementations are simple enough for community members to fork and maintain. All of this prevents vendors from exerting power over users.

> At the same time, copyleft doesn't come free (ha), as developers who need to earn a living will choose to work on problems where they can actually extract some profit to compensate for their effort. Not everyone is keen to work for free, or work as much / as hard for free as they would if they could make a living off it. So yes you might get free-er software, but less of it.

From the article I linked:

> The key to making money with FLOSS is to make software a commoditized complement of other, more profitable services. [1]

[1]: https://www.gwern.net/Complement

> Examples of such services include selling support, customization, consulting, training, managed hosting, hardware, and certifications. Plenty of companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are some names that come to mind.

> Managed hosting isn't a basket worth all your eggs if giants like AWS can do the same at a lower price. Being the developer can give an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; it doesn't offer as obvious an advantage when it comes to hosting.

In other words, developers should be paid for service rather than copies of software. AGPL makes it hard to sell copies of software, but doesn't stop you from offering any number of services. This makes sense, since labor is a scarce resource while copies of software require artificially-imposed scarcity to directly bring revenue.

[clusterfish]

If developers only get paid for selling auxiliary services, no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure.

Most consumer software doesn't in fact need any auxiliary services. It just needs work put in to actually build it, and that work needs to be paid for.

Props to Red Hat for earning money from enterprise clients. That model only works if you have enterprise customers.

Props to System 76 for selling computers. That model only works if you're selling hardware.

My software doesn't need any services or hardware or other auxiliary bullshit, and I'm not going to invent the need for said bullshit just to satisfy some ideologues.

You're not entitled to tell me what kind of software to write or how to license it. Don't like it, write your own FLOSS version, and outcompete me. Don't want to, or can't sustain yourself that way? Then don't tell me that I should, or that I can. Words are cheap.

[tremon]

no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure.

That incentive structure is universal though. A builder also doesn't get paid directly to maintain his toolset, that cost is included in how he charges for his services. A hospital doesn't charge you for the laundry/cleaning services, it's included in their service bill. If a farmer's combine harvester breaks down, he can't just up the price of his wheat twenty-fold to pay for a new one.

There is a market for selling shrink-wrapped software, see e.g. Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple. Invariably these products are proprietary, because Free Software uses a different paradigm: under the free software/open source model, software is a tool, not a product.

[crazypython]

> freedom of movement as power to take someone else's job in another town

Freedom of movement is the power to exchange goods and services with anyone.

> freedom of speech as power to manipulate masses

Freedom of speech is only a freedom if it is accompanied by a potential hearer's freedom to block speech. Modern platforms do not let you choose what or who you want to hear. Freedom of speech without freedom to choose your censor is anarchy.

> Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power.

You are ignoring the freedom to modify/fork, plus the requirement of free documentation.

[clusterfish]

Quite a quantum leap there from proprietary licenses to "modern platforms".

You're free not to use Facebook, Twitter, et al, you know. There are other, open, platforms. And other closed ones that are decent. Use any of them if you want more control over what you read.

Don't fucking shame people for earning money writing good software. Most of us aren't building evil monopolies.

[m4rtink]

Well, GPL is about freedom for the users, not necessarily for the developers.

[goodpoint]

Every developer is also an user.

And "user" freedom is more important because we use tenths of millions of SLOC and do development work on a small fraction.

[tremon]

The copyright holder is never a user in a discussion about distribution rights, though.

[goodpoint]

...in a very narrow sense where one person or organization owns all the copyright on a codebase.

This can be true for a small program on a microcontroller, but 99.9% of FOSS is deployed as part of a big ecosystem.

For each line of code I deploy on production there's 1000 lines of kernel, libraries, daemons, firmware.

As developers, we are 0.1% developers and 99.9% users.

[moron4hire]

How does freedom for the user-who-is-not-a-developer to change the source work, then? The FSF fundamentally assumes the user is a developer. Hell, look at the vast majority of the GNU software. I wouldn't say it's at all targeted at not-developer users.

[erik_seaberg]

The user could hire any developer, he doesn't have to live within the original author's roadmap.

[spoonjim]

Arguing over which one is “freedom” is a petty exercise in trying to claim the moral high ground. Instead, it’s more objective and accurate to say that GPL and BSD represent two different ideologies, and that the AGPL is definitely designed to promulgate the “GPL” ideology, so that it’s inability to be incorporated into BSD-licensed software is a feature and not a bug from the perspective of the people who choose to license their code as AGPL.

[quadrangle]

I think you misunderstand the GPL ideology (to use your words).

The idealogy is that proprietary software is wrong, bad, unethical. Software freedom should be available to all.

The copyleft terms of the GPL are a tactic a means to defending software freedom. And to that extent, all the incompatibility with other free licenses are indeed a bug a downside, a hampering of freedom in practice. That downside is accepted because of (and only when it is) the judgment that it is a net gain for software freedom anyway because it frustrates the development of non-free software.

There does not exist any ideology that wants incompatibility between free software licenses. It is a price that some feel should be paid sometimes in order to be incompatible with non-free licenses which are the actual problem.

[open0]

> If you want to use AGPL software in your project, you're free to relicense under AGPL.

And this condition is the reason that the answer will be "no" every time to using copyleft. Why would anyone ever choose a piece of software which, however you want to twist words, is actually less free in the sense of what it permits and will have less adoption as a result?

I run some websites without ads used by thousands of people and I never intend to monetize them, but I would still avoid these projects solely due to their licensing.

[smichel17]

"Are copyleft licenses more or less free than permissive licenses?" is a pathological nothingburger of an argument because there is no substantial point of disagreement, except on priors, which are never discussed.

Take slavery, or indentured servitude. Nobody seriously argues (any more) that laws against these practices decrease freedom, although they technically restrict the freedom of would-be slave owners. Likewise, if "proprietary software is evil" is table stakes, then copyleft licenses are more free, period. There is no argument.

So, actually what we disagree on is "how unethical is proprietary licensing?" Arguing that permissive licenses are more free is really arguing that proprietary software isn't that bad.

Without having that argument, the other one just goes round and round I circles, like it always does.

[josephcsible]

What do you think the word "free" means exactly, in the context of software freedom?

[ms4720]

Without cost or encumbrance, just like I would expect for a physical free book. The book would not be free if I paid nothing for it and now the author has the right to sleep on my couch legally.

[q3k]

An AGPL license gives you more freedoms than the personal use rights you get from having bought/gotten a book, though.

[rocqua]

An AGPL license comes with more obligations for the one publishing the code, and for others re-using that code.

Against that are more rights for the users of the final code. GPL is predicated on advocating for users' rights over developers. But that comes at the right of developers to re-use as they want.

Which one is more free is very much a matter of perspective. Claims that GPL is a more free license because it is better for users are therefore subjective, or at least subject to a very specific semantic context.

[jordigh]

> projects now cannot use

They can, they just don't want to because they want to ensure other people can produce non-free work.

Remove the desire to produce non-free work and you can perfectly legally put copylefted code into weakly-licensed free code. Weak licenses don't forbid this. Copyleft licenses don't forbid this. There's no need for anyone to change the license or copyright to combine weak licenses with copyleft licenses.

Copyleft licenses forbid proprietary code. And proprietary licenses forbid a lot of other things.

[ezrast]

On the contrary, AGPL (and GPL) cannot be combined with any other license. See section 5c: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

[crazypython]

AGPL can be combined with GPL and vice versa. GPL does not require open-sourcing if it stays on your computer or the computer of your company and its employees. This makes AGPL a much weaker copyleft when on a server.

[jordigh]

That doesn't say you cannot combine it. It's saying what you have to do when you do combine it. It's not a restriction against combining it.

[ezrast]

I don't understand the distinction you're drawing. It sounds like you're saying that "cannot be combined with code under a different license" is meaningfully different from "can be combined with code under a different license, so long as you immediately relicense that code so it's not under a different license anymore". What am I missing?

[jordigh]

Because you're misreading it. It doesn't say you have to relicense the code. It just says (A)GPL terms have to apply to both parts of the code. That's not relicensing. You don't need anyone's permission for weakly-licensed code to do that. Weakly-licensed code already allows it, that's why it's a weak license.

Weakly-licensed code also allows to be covered by a proprietary license. Nobody needs to relicense weakly-licensed code to lock it up in any way and apply further restrictions to it, whether they be "good" restrictions like the (A)GPL, where you forbid further restrictions, or "bad" restrictions like a EULA, where you forbid people to look at your modifications or to do further modifications.

[cygx]

> so long as you immediately relicense that code

Without a copyright transfer agreement in place, only the original author may relicense the code. The permissively licensed parts of the code will stay permissively licensed, but nevertheless may be distributed in combination with copyleft or proprietary code.

[tremon]

Ok, quoting section 5c:

c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

This only says that the product of such a combination must be licensed as AGPL. The MIT/BSD licenses (with or without the attribution clause) specifically allow being included in larger works under any license, even proprietary, so what are you arguing exactly?

[ezrast]

> so what are you arguing exactly?

I have an MIT-licensed project called A, currently at version A1. You have an AGPL-licensed project called B. I take some code from B and incorporate it into version A2 of project A. I want to distribute A2 to A's community.

I don't have to relicense A1 to do this, but I do have to distribute A2, and all subsequent versions of A, under the AGPL, effectively "changing the license" of my project.

I realize this usage is informal - licenses cover code, not projects - but jrv's point upthread was that projects do not want to change their working license, which led me to read jordigh's response as somehow asserting that the AGPL was not viral. It's a non sequitur otherwise.

[the8472]

> but the reality is also that a lot of more permissively licensed (BSD / Apache) projects now cannot use (most) parts of Grafana / Loki / Tempo anymore

Doesn't that depend on how they use it? They're only AGPLing their backends. The tools still follow open protocols, so the client libraries can be permissive. I.e. the rest of their project won't be "infected".

[533474]

I suggest you read more deeply into the legal interpretations; it is not so clear cut as you put it.

A more permissive license is simply incompatible with this project's ideals - they are willing to sacrifice developer convenience for user freedom and prevent corporate theft and bastardization of the codebase into competing products

[533474]

*Correction: My comment is a reply to Seirdy's answer