[zohch]

> As an Open Source developer, you build a new cool library or a tool and license it under AGPL.

Please don't do this, and don't advocate for this. (A/L)GPL is poorly understood by most, poorly worded, and the FSF refuses to clarify basic points regarding it and are openly hostile to people who sell software for money.

One example of the lack of clarity is what constitute linking, and where the boundaries of the covered software is. The like to play a game here where the on one hand suggest it is not linking to make network calls, but then in their own documentation say it is open ended and for court to decide where the boundaries are, which basically makes it completely pointless and a massive landmine. Just use a sane license by less zealous people.

[commoner]

> and are openly hostile to people who sell software for money

That's not true. The FSF endorses selling software for money, as long as the source code for the software is made available under a free license:

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Copyleft licenses can be inconvenient for developers who want to integrate copyleft-licensed software into their own incompatibly licensed software. The proposed arrangement in the article turns this inconvenience into an incentive to pay the developer. With dual licensing, developers of proprietary software can purchase a compatible commercial license to fulfill their product needs and fund development of the copyleft-licensed software at the same time.

[krapp]

>The proposed arrangement in the article turns this inconvenience into an incentive to pay the developer.

An incentive to pay the developer that completely undermines the point of free software (that proprietary software is evil and should be opposed, undermined and eliminated.) Dual licensing legitimizes proprietary software and contributes to its spread.

[commoner]

Richard Stallman of the FSF has a rebuttal to that opinion:

> When I first heard of the practice of selling exceptions, I asked myself whether the practice is ethical. If someone buys an exception to embed a program in a larger proprietary program, he's doing something wrong (namely, making proprietary software). Does it follow that the developer that sold the exception is doing something wrong too?

> If that implication is valid, it would also apply to releasing the same program under a noncopyleft free software license, such as the X11 license. That also permits such embedding. So either we have to conclude that it's wrong to release anything under the X11 license -- a conclusion I find unacceptably extreme -- or reject this implication. Using a noncopyleft license is weak, and usually an inferior choice, but it's not wrong.

> In other words, selling exceptions permits some embedding in proprietary software, and the X11 license permits even more embedding. If this doesn't make the X11 license unacceptable, it doesn't make selling exceptions unacceptable.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

[krapp]

With all due respect to RMS, having read the linked page, that's a weak rebuttal. He seems to reject the premise on the grounds that it's sometimes inconvenient, but accepts it entirely on philosophical grounds when explaining why the FSF doesn't dual-license.

So I think he agrees with my general argument that dual licensing does undermine the principles of free software, but accepts that not everyone can afford to be a zealot.

I'm just suggesting that more appropriate licensing schemes already exist if a developer wants to be paid.

[commoner]

> He seems to reject the premise on the grounds that it's sometimes inconvenient

His argument is that if you consider dual licensing to be immoral because it enables the development of proprietary software, then to be logically consistent, you must also consider non-copyleft FOSS licenses such as BSD/MIT to be immoral because they do the same to an even greater extent. Stallman does not say that dual licensing undermines free software, he only says that it does not support free software as much as copyleft licensing does.

The FSF only uses copyleft licenses for software instead of non-copyleft FOSS licenses or dual licensing, sidestepping this issue entirely. They don't have a problem if people use BSD/MIT, so they also don't have a problem if people use dual licensing.

[hnfong]

They can't be clear, because the law is manifestly unclear.

The theory they give for disallowing non-GPL code to link to GPL libs is that the linking process involves copyrighted code and materials in the header files and interface (API).

This is, of course, what the Oracle v Google case was all about. The code in question is even (dual) licensed under GPL! If the US Supreme Court can't give a straight answer to whether APIs are copyrightable, the FSF is wise not to give any advice that would potentially put their proverbial foot in their mouth.

It's not a new theory of mine either - https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[e-mail]...

Of course, the legal uncertainty doesn't stop RMS and his friends from spreading FUD about GPL "virality" because that theory helps making everything GPL.

That said, I think GPLv2 is generally OK if you believe in ideas of "Copyleft". In retrospect I think it's kind of sad that GPL slowly fell out of favor by devs because of all the complications of the GPL (of which some you mentioned). I remember in the early 2000s almost everything was GPLv2 by default. The world swung to permissive licenses after GPLv3 became too ambitious and made the licensing issues too complicated for the average software dev to care about. I suspect a lot of resentment that OSS devs don't get compensated is partially due to the ecosystem giving a lot of peer pressure for devs to use a permissive license by default (where they might actually have intended something like copyleft or non-commercial use licenses).

I know a significant part of my salary is paid for by the productivity of permissive licensed OSS (i.e. my employer doesn't have to pay OSS, so presumably part of the saving goes to paying me), but still these "what ifs" are still worth thinking about, and maybe there's still a chance that some issues could be addressed.