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by chii 4036 days ago
then why can you not modify your tivo?

GPL2 hasn't had that problem present when it was written, and so tivo found a way to prevent practical modification, even tho they followed the letter of the license.

In my eyes, most, if not all open source software should use AGPL, and dual license a commercial license offer for those people who want to buy it for modification. You should contribute, or pay up, else the tragedy of the commons will occur.
2 comments
sokoloff 4036 days ago
AGPL is a market failure as I see it. I understand and sympathize with what that license is trying to do, but in practice, it just means that many companies won't touch that software (or will only touch it in a fashion where they don't modify that part of the system), meaning that there are far fewer adopters at all, and of those that adopt, fewer modify the software, meaning that it evolves more slowly than products with more used licenses.
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detaro 4036 days ago
Biggest problem seems to be kind-of unclear rules where it stops, especially when it comes to web applications (templates, linked assets, ...).

There are surprisingly few "trustworthy" comments on that out there, most stuff you find is a bunch of people going "I think XXX, but IANAL" on stack overflow.

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yellowapple 4036 days ago
Honestly, I'd sooner prefer to see everything licensed under BSD / MIT (Expat, X11) / ISC / etc. "copycenter" / "copyfree" licenses, for the simple reason that very few people in their right mind would use the AGPL at all (let alone in a project that doesn't involve writing network-facing software), and I'd rather see more software be compatible with as many free software licenses as possible. Aside from public domain, such non-copyleft licenses are a dream for writing free software, since the license doesn't get in the way of using such code in, say, Apache'd or GPL'd or MPL'd or whatever-L'd code.

(A)GPL, in other words, should be reserved for things that aren't meant to be reusable by other codebases. For everything that should be reusable, LGPL is about the limit for something being usable (and even that can be difficult to work with).

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