AGPL will stop Amazon. It won't stop WP Engine.
There needs to be a license that enables your customers to use you freely, but not your competitors from reselling your hard work.
If you want to protect your project from being resold by potential competitors, do not release it as open source.
I think this problem might solve itself, though. Slowly but surely, companies and power users have become very wary of VC funded companies making big promises and big open source releases, with the knowledge that there is rarely a plan for sustainability and that there is a good chance if they stand on that rug it could be pulled later. Soon, if trends continue, the advantages that you once got from announcing something as open source will start to evaporate and turn into a liability as people start seeing ahead to the eventual "but of course we have to be able to monetize this eventually" stage.
The way I see it, a project can always be open sourced later on once there's a way to do it and ensure the company can remain sustainable. For the flagship product of a company, especially a VC-funded company, not starting open source is the ethical thing to do.
I can't even..
Seriously, I don't understand where your argument is coming from. Because, if you look at it from the greater good perspective, commercial open-source is one of the only venues to build high quality software that can be freely self-hosted, modified and built-upon. Yet, you basically push for people building closed source software, due to what I understand is dogmatic believe of what open-source should mean.
> If you make a license that actually discriminates on user or use case, then it's not open source.
Based on a definition, bought and sponsored by the hyperscaler lobbies. Why the hell would discriminating against hyperscaller selling the product makes it non "open-source". 99.9999% users of open-source are not hyperscaler wanting to host and sell the product and will get value from the project.
Secondly, you can call it whatever you want but "open source" licenses that discriminate against user and use case are useless. Even if I just want to use something like a data structure implementation from your "open source" release in some unrelated project, I now have to inherit all of this baggage about your competitors. That just doesn't make any sense. The endgame of that is an ecosystem of open source that ultimately serves absolutely nobody except for maybe startup PR needs.
We self-host n8n, which by definition not open-source, and love it. It serves us. Not just n8n PR. That is the case for almost all self served products for non-commercial reasons
On the other hand, I think you can release shared source and closed source software that is still plenty useful and beneficial. For example, I am a very big fan of how Unreal Engine is licensed. Yes, it isn't "open source" and it isn't marketed as such. You can't take Unreal Engine components and go use them elsewhere even if you're not competing with Epic Games. Still, they provide some extremely powerful and useful software free of charge to basically all independent game developers. I think that's fantastic.
But that's all aside from what open source is. Unreal Engine isn't open source and it doesn't do anything for the open source ecosystem. Which is fine, because the entire world doesn't revolve around open source.
You seem to believe that we shouldn't create closed source software but at the same time directly advocating for it—that's what it is that's what you're describing. If you want a more practical and less idealistic reason why it sucks when software companies prevent people like AWS from using their software, it's because the actual users of your software, the customers of AWS, wish to pay AWS to host it for them. They would like to hire the lovely folks who work at AWS to host and manage the software for them and the license prevents that. You are preventing your users from doing what they want with the software. And that's the rub, that's why it's important to not discriminate based off of use.
No true scotsman.
There are such licenses. They are just not open source.
I just wish there was a way to ensure that the company itself doesn't do a proprietary fork.
But, if the code base becomes a patchwork of contributors, it can become difficult to relicense.
https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/
Running a SaaS with in-house modifications is a protected use case for free software. The AGPL is a EULA masquerading as a license.
In the era of cloud, distribution needs to include distribution over wire, because so many apps are now run in the cloud. And that's why AGPL. It preserves the spirit of GPL in modern times.
This is incorrect. You are only forced to publish if you are creating derivative works. See how overleaf uses propietary git integration with AGPL overleaf.
This is typical of software developers trying to interpret law. Can you imagine someone explaining to a judge that they are suing for a breach of license terms under the circumstances. "So, you are saying he did not give himself access to the code on his laptop?"
Even if that nonsense was correct, there is a dead easy workaround. Run a server with the code on it bound to localhost and you then have your network server for all users interacting with the code (yourself!). Not needed, just an additional layer of proof the claim "it is impossible to comply" is false.
Edit: to add, I am also not impressed by the author's other blog posts, such as a moan about not having PRs for FOSS projects accepted for good reasons (if you dig down into it). Lots of other complaining and nonsense too.
I actually made the jump from tailscale -> netbird last month. Definitely more work and learning, but much more aligned w/ my perspective of self-hosting and open-source software. (Yes I thought about headscale but the YouTube reviews of netbird won me over).
I personally think the definition of open-source is problematic (and clearly biased by the lobbies of hyperscalers). Why aren't n8n or MongoDB considered open-source? (https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md, https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/community-edition) Why does requesting that others not sell your product make the project not open-source?
SaaS, meanwhile, is the least open and least free model of software distribution, significantly less open or free (as in freedom) than closed-source commercial software you run yourself. This model, SaaS, is powered from the ground up by open source, and most SaaS gives little or nothing back. Some SaaS is not much more than a management and UI layer built around pre-existing open source standards and code.
Something is very wrong if open source exists largely to enable the least free model of software distribution. Open source as currently conceptualized is stuck in the pre-SaaS eras of the 1980s and 1990s and refuses to adapt to what "free" and "open" mean in the new landscape.
It doesn't help that the OSI is fully captured by companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta with a vested interest in promoting the SaaS and cloud-first model. If local-first ever gained traction it would be a threat to not just their SaaS products but their incredibly lucrative cloud businesses.
I've used Free Software and Open Source over 20 years and have never paid a SaaS company a dime.
OTOH the most valuable software that I regularly use is Free Software as opposed to Open Source Software. So maybe the OSS really is primarily free labor for SaaS?
You're part of a very, very small minority. I'm talking about the majority of developers and what the majority of users experience.
What most users are experiencing today is an aggressively non-free non-open zero-privacy rent-seeking software environment that is enabled by open source under the hood. This seems contrary to the stated goals of free software.
But the thing is, commercial open source companies play a huge role in making great open source tools, especially ones you can self-host. Without them, a lot of the software we rely on wouldn't even exist. People often push back when these companies change their licenses, but they forget the reality. Big cloud providers can make tons of money off open source projects without giving anything back. That's a tough spot for the folks.
I'm sure that in the nearest future we will have some COSS licenses :) Well, as an open source contributor I hope so
In the case of MongoDB, it's because the SSPL requires that all the software used to offer the network service is also licensed under the SSPL. That prevents it from being used to write Free Software by mixing free programs and libraries that use a different license, even it they are free. So, for example, if your network service supports managing MongoDB instances, and it includes Caddy or Nginx, then you're not complying with the license, as Caddy and Nginx aren't released under the SSPL and you cannot relicense them.
> Why does requesting that others not sell your product make the project not open-source?
Because requesting them to not do that makes your program proprietary, and thus non-free by definition.
How is this logic not literally Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
The change is NetBird company saying, the improvements from now on are AGPLv3 licensed, but that doesnt stop from anyone to fork today and continue with BSD-3 license.
It is exactly that. We need more free software which is actually free for everyone and every use case in all the senses of free. We don't need more "free software" except there are owners who get to control who uses it, how they use it, and how they can make money with it.
There is SO MUCH WASTE that could be eliminated by a few developers getting paid decent salaries to put their work into the public domain (by this I mean BSD style very permissive licenses).
Imagine a grant giving organization that companies were encouraged to give a hundredth of a percent of their revenue to which focused on paying full time developers to build and maintain fully featured tools which are the most useful to society as a whole.
braginini•2h ago