Underfunding or why I am not interested

[anatoly techtonik]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 8:45 PM, Aaron Wolf <wolftune at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> What are you protecting from with AGPL?
>
> The purpose of AGPL is to block software from becoming proprietary.

I believe it is far-fetched argument. Nobody can turn what is already written
under non-restrictive license to become proprietary. They can build something
on top of it - yes - is it what AGPL supporters afraid of? But they
can not force
people to use their paid and proprietary versions and these people are free to
develop their own branch as before.

If you want to preserve name without limiting freedom, perhaps zlib license
will do the good.

The original software can be erased - that's true, but isn't it the role of
sfconservancy.org to ensure that it will be preserved? Isn't it the goal that it
is raises funds for?

Underfunding is a failure, which doesn't do good for the goals of project.
I expressed my position why I didn't support the initiative, and I believe
that I am not alone and the funding goal could be reached with
acceptable consensus.

I have a good understanding of licensing issues and can even explain some
of them. I just want to clarify the exact position of NPO accounting
project members to ensure that I got it right that people are afraid of.

> It is also consistent to say that you care about freedom and believe that
> AGPL is less free than CC0, but only if you also recognize that proprietary
> software is obviously much less free. If you're ok with proprietary, you
> should be ok with AGPL, which is clearly much much more free than
> proprietary.

Let's talk without "only if".

For my accounting purposes I am not ok with limiting my personal freedom
and the freedom of others in either way.

> But you seem to be arguing not that AGPL is bad for freedom but merely that
> it isn't a good tactic for making the software successful. That's a fine
> argument. Not everyone may agree. It's complex how to choose the right
> compromises.

Right. But the project had goal, and didn't reach it. The AGPL tactic already
failed, before the battle began. I don't really care that the project chooses to
continue slaughter soldiers anyway, but just want people to know the opinion.

> Either way, please don't conflate the words "commercial" and "proprietary"
> though. It is perfectly fine for Free Software to be commercial and stay
> free-as-in-freedom.

I don't care about both of those. I care about limiting the freedom of people
to maintaining and even selling their own modification that may not be useful
for the main line at all.
-- 
anatoly t.