[burnt-resistor]

FYI in case anyone were wondering: Meta uses Hack, not PHP. (Hack's packaging, documentation, and availability suck because there's no performance review "impact" to making things better that no one inside Meta sees. Plus, there's job security in knowledge hoarding.)

Licensing: Meta and Google[1], and likely Microsoft, Apple, and most other megacorps explicitly forbid any use of AGPL software because it cannot be proven to be prevented from being invoked according to the vagueness of the "Remote Network Interaction" clause. So if you never want megacorps or anyone who runs a business to ever use your code, choose AGPL.

1. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

[eadmund]

> So if you never want megacorps or anyone who runs a business to ever use your code, choose AGPL.

Plenty of businesses run AGPL software (e.g. Grafana, Mastodon or Mattermost). Fewer run AGPL software for external paying customers.

As a developer, I care about the freedom of my users; I don’t much care about the paranoia of a megacorp who wants to restrict the freedom of its customers.

[arccy]

but you don't care enough to let your users choose to pay some other business to host it for them

[eadmund]

The AGPL allows that.

[graemep]

> So if you never want megacorps or anyone who runs a business to ever use your code, choose AGPL.

Not "anyone who runs a business" but "any business that uses your software to provide a proprietary network service".

That is the whole point of the AGPL!

Google's reasoning in your link is pretty clear that the problem is that they are a provider of network services. Most non tech businesses wold be completely unaffected by these issues and have no reason to care.

[p_l]

The problem is that the language is vague enough and untested enough a lot of places, including non-technical ones, can be wary of being the test case.

[rollcat]

What would it take to test it in court? Plenty of projects choose AGPL for whatever philosophical / moral reasons, perhaps even out of fear of competition. Is it just that it's "radioactive" enough to scare away anyone who'd consider it actually interesting?

[p_l]

I imagine it could take some minor contributor deciding they don't like what you do and taking extreme interpretation of AGPL including trying to insist everything that talks over network to it is derivative work, vs interpretation of yours (let's say you're not modifying an AGPL project at all, just running it vanilla, and it's part of some bigger offering, and your lawyers said it's not crucial enough for the bigger offering to be considered derivative)

As far as many people are concerned, AGPL is vague enough it would end up in court, so the question becomes "do I want to have this sword of Damocles of unnecessary complications and upsets?"

[senko]

In other words, if you're an open source startup and want to avoid being AWS'd, choose dual AGPL + commercial (with IP transfer CLAs).

[znpy]

Which is what Grafana essentially did, and it's going great (as a company and as a suite of products, their stuff is incredibly good).

[arccy]

but also kind of sucks for users since you can't reuse the graph widgets elsewhere... which is why https://perses.dev/ is now a thing

[znpy]

looks like a poorer version grafana, with a worse license?

Also grafana has "observability as code" since release 12: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/whatsnew/whats-new-i...

And it seems there used to be something similar from earlier as well: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/12/06/a-complete-guide-to-mana...

[orchestrator]

Funny Grafana added "as code" after Perses did it, look like small players can impact big players and they can be useful to the ecosystem :) I do not understand why you say it's a worse licence?

[znpy]

The second link is from like 2022, and I remember having code checked into git for dashboard in 2021 or so.

> I do not understand why you say it's a worse licence?

Apache license is inferior to the AGPL that Grafana is using. If the project is any good it's just a matter of time before Amazon or some other big company starts selling a fork of the codebase and draining development resources, as it happened with Redis, ElasticSearch and other companies.

[nerdyadventurer]

Can you please explain how this model works?

[pjmlp]

That is the only way for anyone that would like to make a living out of open source.

Other than that, younger generations are getting why the old models from shareware and trial demos, source available have made a comeback under apparently new models.

[mbonnet]

Plenty of big businesses will use AGPL software ... because you can dual license. AGPL lets you claim "open source" while still being able to pretty universally charge for the software's use via your commercial licensing option.

[nerdyadventurer]

I'm confused can you please explain it bit more, are you talking about open core model?

[dawnerd]

Meta _does_ have some PHP apps. They have a collection of sites running WordPress.

[burnt-resistor]

That's not running on the main site. 99.99999% of it is Hack.

[darqis]

I thought it's using Go nowadays. Weren't so many packages rewritten in Go?