Underfunding or why I am not interested

[Aaron Wolf]

I think some of these AGPL concerns are perfectly valid.

Keep in mind, however, it is also true that there are lots of people 
out there who aren't license wonks or hardcore software freedom 
proponents or opponents. For the average people out there, they might 
be interested in contributing and using and whatever for reasons that 
have nothing to do with the license. They also might not bother to free 
their work or might decide to go proprietary not because they really 
think about it, but just because it seems reasonable to them. When they 
see that AGPL tells them they must keep the license and share their 
source, they do, and they don't really mind. They might not have had 
strong feelings either way.

So the use of license can have a major impact on the behaviour of 
regular folks who don't care to make a fuss about it and don't care to 
hold a grudge either. They are just happy to work with the terms that 
seem to be the social norm. If the norm says, "go ahead and make your 
version proprietary if that's in your interest" that has a different 
effect from a social norm of "hey, we're all in this to share and it's 
your duty to respect the freedom downstream after your changes."

I support AGPL as much for those reasons as for any pedantic legal 
reasons. In other words, I care more about encouraging that social norm 
than about the licensing details. These issues definitely interact 
though.

Cheers,
Aaron

On Sun 23 Feb 2014 11:48:53 PM PST, HRJet wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 12:53 PM, HRJet <hrjet9 at gmail.com
> <mailto:hrjet9 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     This sort of strings-attached freedom is in my opinion not going
>     to really matter. Vendors will just move their secret sauce to
>     other places.
>
>
> After further thought, I guess this "moving of secret sauce" is only
> possible in GPL, because the license doesn't cross API boundaries.
> IIRC this wouldn't be possible at all in AGPL.
>
> I also realized just now that "moving of secret sauce" is actually a
> good thing from a security and privacy perspective; the secrets are
> now in a smaller black box, which means it is easier to restrict the
> amount of data shared with these boxes.
>
> So, I am beginning to like GPL, but I am still not in favour of AGPL.