[arek_nawo]

So true. I have no problem with using and paying for a hosted, "cloud" version of the product if a self-hosting option is available. It reassures me that I can rely on this product, while not being vendor-locked.

I've certainly seen many different licenses used in COSS projects, including different mixes of them. E.g.: for my latest project I've decided to use mainly AGPL-3.0 (a pretty strong copyleft license) with specific parts licensed under MIT.

That said, my goal wasn't to limit the usage, but to be open-source, and provide self-hosting option (the 2 fundamental advantages you can provide to your users by being open-source, IMHO), while making sure nobody just runs the product on their servers, rebrands it, and sells it to others as a service (which, while possible with other licenses, is simply unethical in my book).

[bruce511]

Everyone is clearly entitled to their own set of ethics, but in this situation ethics is not a problem.

One of the explicit permissions of Free Software (and by extension Open Source Software) is that you can sell the software or otherwise profit off it. There is no stipulation that you need to be the primary author, or any kind of contributer to do this.

Equally there is the very explicit freedom to not restrict what people can do with the software. This is quite literally in the definition of Free Software.

Thus rebranding a product, and hosting it yourself, is completely consistent with the Free Software ideals, as long as the user conforms to the terms of the license (making source code available.)

AGPL does not stop rebranding/ rehosting, nor is it designed to. There are licenses that do that well, but they are not OSS licenses.

Ethically I subscribe to the idea that the author was free to license their work (open or closed) however they chose. I'm happy to use , or not use, the product based on the license -they- chose. I'm not obligated to impose additional restrictions on their work. If they wanted those restrictions they have the choice to add them.

You are of course free to apply any framework of ethics to yourself that you like. I'd also point out that using the AGPL specifically does -not- prevent someone from running your product on their server rebranding it, and selling it for money. Doing that is completely within the bounds of AGPL.

[arek_nawo]

Thanks for clarifying. I should indeed explain better what I had in mind.

You are correct that under AGPL-3.0 people still can provide the software as a service, but they’ll have to disclose any changes to the source code they’ve made.

This, in my mind, effectively discourages doing so as, if all you do is change the branding, people will eventually know and, depending on their ethics and the provided offering, they might choose not to use the “official” service.

In theory people still could distribute the product as-is or just be fine with the open-sourcing and actually add something of value to their fork. However, as I’ve seen in practice, this doesn’t seem to happen at a meaningful scale and people usually prefer to contribute directly to the original project.

Like you’ve said, there are other licenses that aren’t really open-source, prohibiting this from happening at all.

Most interesting options from these, for me, were SSPL (which puts the open-sourcing requirement on other elements of your stack, like hosting provider, making it a non-starter), or ELv2 (which just prohibits SaaS use entirely).

But again, not being recognized as official open-source licenses, using these puts the project more in the camp of source-available software rather than open-source.

[bruce511]

You make good points, but alas I must disagree with them. Specifically;

>>This, in my mind, effectively discourages doing so as, if all you do is change the branding, people will eventually know and, depending on their ethics and the provided offering, they might choose not to use the “official” service.

There are a lot of factors that go into a SaaS decision. Price obviously, but also things like name-recognition etc.

In a business environment I'm more likely to use ElasticSearch from AWS because we already pay them every month (so I don't need a million people to sign off on it.) Plus I'm comfortable that they will be around next year, and they have the resources to fix hardware issues.

AWS running ElasticSearch is completely within the license (OK, until recently) and thus ethically I'm free to use it. It's being used -exactly- as elasticSearch released it to be used.

They obviously thought your argument was true, that people would prefer their hosting, but apparently they were wrong.

I get the desire to advertise a product as "free software" or "open source". But don't then complain when users make use of those freedoms. Be sure to pick a license that conforms to your actual goals. If you have conflicting goals then you need to resolve that first.

I love open source as much as the next guy, but its not a marketing term, it's a licensing term. Be sure you choose it for the right reasons.

[arek_nawo]

Also fair points :)

I think it all depends on the project’s scale, type (is it part of your infrastructure like a database or all-in-one solution like a CMS, etc.), goals and other factors.

It’s difficult to make the right choice at the very start, as something that might have worked then might not work when you’re at a scale of competing with AWS.