Free and Open Source Software

Contributing to open source projects is pretty much just altruism.

If we're talking about protection of people integrating open source code in their proprietary code we'll always have issues. It doesn't matter if we declare our projects under GPL, AGPL, LGPL, CC or whatever, unless they do shoddy work, we won't be able to know what code snippets, libraries or frameworks they're using when source code isn't disclosed.

People that want to be assholes will always be assholes. If you feel like giving back, contribute to an open source project. If you don't, don't. But making it about evil corporations is a bit meh. Even a company like Amazon is actively contributing to improving Java, offering the Amazon Corretto JDK for free. So the path forward may just be trying to be the change yourself, and making sure the company you're working for is also giving back somehow.

I think the biggest con with this kind of license is that it also means neither you nor the collaborators can try to make a living out of it. Such a type of license forces entirely hobby work.

The cost of maintainership of the project and the fact that it may exclude people that don't have the privilege of being able to contribute in their free time are both things that concern me quite a bit when you remove all commercial usage.

I agree, the parasitic nature of this relationship has been sharpened in the past week and made many of us think more critically of it.

My question is - what happens if several significant FOSS projects change their licence to "Sources must be publically available if repackaged" or even "Cannot be packaged for sale", specifically to prevent a non-freely available distro profiting from it.

Yes, that distro could fork the software at the point before the new licence is applied, but they they would be responsible for maintaining that fork going forwards, no? And that would take a lot of resources and need it to be called something else.

Isn't the ultimate issue enforceability? For a dev to be awarded some of the profit made off an open source project:

1. A whistleblower would have to discover, gather, and publish evidence that the software was being used to generate profit
2. The dev would have to win a court case against the company

It would be fuckin rad if that happened and a dev got a huge payout and a legal precedent was set. But it'd be more rad if we didn't live in a society where this was an issue in the first place :[

Just to add to the topic, the 'condom code' point you bring up is actually well-established in the business - the so-called 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' technique.

There are a number of licenses that do this. And yes, many of them are not OSI approved and people will say mean things about not using the word open source. Which you should ignore and instead perhaps say fair source instead if you care.

A couple to look at:

Big Time License

a public LICENSE that makes software free for noncommercial and small-business use, with a guarantee that fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory paid-license terms will be available for everyone else

Prosperity License

Prosperity is a public LICENSE for software that makes work free for noncommercial use, with a built-in free trial for commercial users.

I also recommend going through the back log of posts by Kyle Mitchell, an engineer - lawyer who has authored a number of great software licenses, including the two I listed.

Software licenses cannot solve every problem and AGPL is still the best option.

There are many larger problems related to FOSS including freeloading, right of repair, surveillance, lock-in... and they require social solutions rather than new licenses.

I basically take the position "you need a different, non-confusing term". Open Code is not such a term.

My view is shaped from the cultural realm more so than the software side, but I think the concern at the centre of it is transferable: it becomes extremely messy to capture the desired acceptable uses in the legal wording of an enforceable license. The outcome is that every use will have to be individually authorised.

I was helping run and occasionally held the editor role of a leftist magazine which we decided to make Free Culture under CC-BY-SA. Content using the Non Commercial clause gave us such headache, while even though we did not charge for the magazine nor we ran adverts, we accepted and strongly encouraged donations from our readers. That money went to pay off the printing costs (the NC clause already has a problem with that, but we assumed that would still be defensible), but the rest was also invested in other endeavours like public events, or eventually helping fund a community centre.

At that point, it didn't matter if creators with NC works released them under a supposedly free license. Our -in our opinion- non-for-profit use was still so tainted with money changing hands, that we still needed to seek their consent and get a written permission on top of the original license. At the end of the day, it was the same as working with All Rights Reserved works, where we get a special license from a sympathetic creator. The NC clause solved nothing for us.

That part is, I believe, the same with software licenses. We will end up having to get 1:1 license agreements for so many things because the new anti-commercial licenses will not be able to predict all the scenarios which are "false positives" for the anti-capitalist software developer (as in, some desirable re-uses will be blocked by the license, and individual licensing agreements will be needed often).

My focus would be to fix the loopholes that go counter to the copyleft spirit in AGPL, if such loopholes are identified, and perhaps get a more reliable organisation handle the AGPL definition in the future.

It's a broder societal cultural problem. No license can ever fix it. Companies and corporatons are made up of people, and if life has only taught them to wreck everybody they can, they will do their work with a mentality of exploiting any chance they to make sure only they succeed.

Any kind of long term fix to change corporations will take generations, not a legal standard.

There was a time when a verbal agreement and a handshake was an unbreakable commitment because people shared a common set of principals and personal values that bonded people together. It took generatios to destroy that sense of honour, it will take generations to get back to that. People are delusional if they think corporate exploitation can be fixed through courts, the law, or politics, only culture.

@TheTrueLinuxDev - If your goal is indeed non-commercial usage, then what you need is a clear new license with a clear new name: "Non-Commercial Source License" (NCSL), or possibly "Public Domain Source License" (PDSL).

You want an option analogous to NC in Creative Commons:

Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted

https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/

You don't need to read much history to find plenty of bad things done by non-commercial entities, e.g. governments. Or churches.

It's not commerce that is the problem, it is oppression. Use of my code for oppressive purposes is the thing I want to avoid.

MongoDB has a modified version of the AGPL that they call Server Side Public License that might interest you. Specifically the change in section 13:

“Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

By my reading, it closes that loophole you mention by specifically calling out interfaces and APIs as also requiring the source to be available. At the top of the page I linked there is also a PDF showing the removals and additions they made to the AGPL to end up with their SSPL.

I kind of want GPL, but with one extra clause that says that violating the terms of the GPL permanently and irrevocably terminates all right to touch anything else under the same license, including your own code.

It hasn't been tested in court yet in the US as far as I know, but non-commercial licenses can potentially be more restrictive than you intend. As such, I don't contribute on projects with non-commercial licenses and I know others who do the same.

That said, I understand the frustration of big companies using your code for something big and you not getting a share of the profits. That frustration though, either as a frustration of capitalists benefiting from your work or from you not getting profit you feel you may deserve, seems like a nothing-burger to me. If you weren't planning on selling licenses to your code before-hand and them using it doesn't affect the maintenance burden that you have, then what is the problem? It functionally changes nothing concerning the time and effort you were planning to put in.

The power of open-source licenses is in how they allow for quick and painless sharing of software for the collective benefit of others. There are tons of ways to get paid while using open-source licenses. Non-commercial licenses are unnecessary bloat that could gum up the works.

I've worked at more than one job where I was told it was OK to use MIT, or Apacje-2.0 licensed things, but to not touch any GPL or AGPL software.

So, even though there wasn't any non-commercial clause in the license, it's copyleft nature led to that effect at those businesses.

In general, I like the balance that the GPL & AGPL strike - commercial use is allowed, but the company has to give back. The "condom code" thing that you mentioned is certainly less than ideal. I would prefer that businesses open up their full codebase. But, I think the more likely scenario is that they just don't use any open source at all (or they use it and violate the license!) I'd prefer condom code over either of those possibilities.

Simply put, for works you want to prevent from being commercialized by other companies. Don't open-source it. Keep it closed source. If you feel like it, put an email address out there and say something like "if you want access to the source, let's talk." It requires you to vet everyone who has access but if you are wanting to be that guarded with your code then that's what you need to do.

That said you could just BSD/MIT license your code. If your project is small it's unlikely to even be noticed. In the end, any license you create that offers the source code without applications means it's open for any corporation to just take. Regardless of the code license. The fact is that you are a small-time developer and don't have the power of lawyers to counter them. So either open your code for everyone, vet each entity you open the code for, or don't introduce the headache of dealing with any of this and keep it closed. Tell yourself you will open the source later on after you are done with it.

Realistically, these are your options. There are plenty of creative commons or such licenses that exist to exclude commercial works but again, lawyers cost money. If you aren't willing to fight the battle you might as well CC0 the code because that's essentially what it is.

There are already licenses like this. Namely the sspl and the bsl. Id argue they drive away more contribution than they protect devs. Especially sspl because it's not clear if I have to open my entire automation repo if I give a 3rd part contractor access to a web app. Also they are not open source since they restrict who can use it

To ensure software freedom you must first destroy capitalism

While I don't want to even pretend to tell you how to make your decisions, you actually provide your own argument for why non-commercial licenses fail: Just like you can cordon off AGPL code and not let it touch your main project, big corporations are more than happy to juggle accounting tricks to make a certain piece of a project look "non-commercial," if it'll make them money.

In my opinion, it'd be better to force them (by the terms of the license) to contribute changes back upstream, so that if you disapprove of their use, you have the ability to publicly shame them as it happens.

I’ve heard of the term “copyleft”, which allows everyone EXCEPT corporations to use a certain work.

Historically the GPL seems to be not cermercial in the sense of taking care for developers rights. The GPL is also connected to the term Open Source. Because it was too restricted for some cases a derivation was made witj the LGPL with which it is posdible to use GPL licenced libraries easier in combination with other more restricted or more opened licenses.

For some looking for Free Software all this was too restricted and the libre BSD license and all its derivations were made.

There are several licenses which forbid commercial use. But where does this work? When I want to use a piece of software while working on a profitable project it is commercial use. It may be on purpose to restrict this but sometimes it is not meant to be not free.

Do you mind explaining the loophole to the AGPL a little more? I didn't quite understand that part.