[unknownian]

I enjoyed the post and this is off-topic but when I was younger I was very pro-GPL and I still like copyleft, but to me the logic behind it makes less and less sense as time goes on. RMS compares software to a physical book you can modify, make copies of, and share with your friends, but in my opinion, software is much more like a power drill, a tool you can modify with difficulty and let people borrow. The analogy for software as media is also ironic because the FSF themselves claim that the GPL is not intended for media works and recommend other licenses (like Creative Commons which I support).

I do like the idea that GPL prevents big corps from taking advantage of programmers, but the idea that a GPL program is inherently better than a proprietary program written by an independent developer no longer makes sense to me, though independent proprietary software is often abandoned. But more importantly, it doesn't seem fair when a company makes an AGPL devops tool and then a bigger corp just sells that product as a service. When companies like MongoDB decide to change their licenses so that Amazon doesn't steal all their customers, I don't feel bad about it at all. I have no skin in this game but it blows my mind that there are FSF people who defend massive corporations essentially reselling a smaller company's work solely for the sake of ideological purity. Someone can correct me if I've been misinformed here.

[jacooper]

If its open, they are selling managed hosting, its the main reason the AGPL exists, you must publish the modifications, even for network usage.

[Gigachad]

This is not a barrier. Amazon is perfectly able to publish their changes if any. Because the moat is that its hosted inside AWS at a button click. They can also host it for cheaper as they don't have to pay anything to develop the product.

[unknownian]

Then why did Mongo relicense? I assumed that AGPL was not enough to maintain their business which is why they are now using a more extreme form of AGPL that is no longer considered Free.

[UncleEntity]

You can fully, legally use AGPL software as Amazon was doing as long as you follow the licensing terms.

Which doesn’t help the FOSS developers extract money out of the cloud users because they can just use the free (for whatever value of ‘free’ Amazon provides) bundled version without any support contacts or whatever.

If your entire business model is based on giving away the software you can see how this might be a problem, no?

[unknownian]

Are you disagreeing with me or just giving more detail? Because I think that's what I was saying. My opinion is that this is not fair to a company like MongoDB.

[aries185]

For clarification: MongoDB is still Free as in beer, but not free as in Libre. IOW, Anyone can use MongoDB without paying money, but they cannot offer it to others as-a-service without providing the entire stack of hosting software back to the community. And of course AWS won't do that. So therefore the license is not 'free' to AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.

[brian-armstrong]

I think this is a reasonable take. To add a slightly more unreasonable one to it,

I would rather just never read GPL source fullstop. I don't want the copyleft to taint me and inadvertently reproduce copyleft code where I can't, so I will just avoid reading it entirely. I try to avoid using GPL libraries entirely if I can help it since inevitably I may need to circle back and read some of the source.

It's an interesting idea and I cheer those who manage to live in an ideologically pure bubble but I don't think it's fair to say GPL is strictly more free than BSD/MIT.