[License-discuss] What's wrong with the AGPL?

[Dirk Riehle]

On 26.06.24 16:19, Roland Turner via License-discuss wrote:
> On 26/6/24 20:42, Dirk Riehle wrote:
>> It works for CiviCRM (non-profit) like it works (worked) for SugarCRM
>> (commercial). If you can AGPL the whole application without additional
>> permissive client library shims etc, it works as intended. It doesn't
>> work for the component vendors that came later and which needed more
>> complicated licensing; the vendors problem is that they can't separate
>> potential customers from hyperscalers through licensing strategy.
>
> It might be worth taking a moment to consider the objectives of open 
> source licensing with respect to commercially-produced software (and 
> commerce generally). The objective is not to weaken protections to 
> whatever extent a class of investors might find profitable, it's to 
> preserve user and developer freedom, and as a secondary concern to 
> facilitate whatever commercial opportunities might exist therein. That 
> is, it's about freedom, not about investment. In particular, any 
> variant of "separate potential customers from hyperscalers through 
> licensing strategy" is likely to be incompatible with free or open 
> source licensing, because the objectives at that point are 
> diametrically opposed.
>

I don't see a contradiction courtesy of open source licenses.

> There is an important problem here, and I don't yet have a view as to 
> how it might be solved. It's that one of the areas that's a 
> particularly strong candidate for F/OSS collaboration is also one of 
> the areas that's strongest for IaaS and PaaS cloud service provision, 
> meaning that cooperation is always going to be difficult:
>
> * Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) describes it as "undifferentiated heavy
> lifting".
> * I think it's close to what you're describing as components.
> * I'd describe it as engineering investment in artefacts and
> capabilities that aren't determinative for purchase decisions by
> the organisation's customers.
>

This is easy. You are talking about community open source, which is 
communally owned, unlikely to change its license ever, and probably not 
going to be owned by a single company, ever.

> When you move "undifferentiated heavy lifting" from an organisation 
> selling widgets to a cloud service provider, you change who the 
> organisation is, and therefore who its customers are:
>
> * Prior to the move, the engineers in the widget maker were free to
> cooperate with their peers in other makers of different widgets
> because their respective organisations weren't engaged in zero-sum
> competition with respect to any of their customers, or even with
> direct competitors so long as what they're co-operating on is not
> differentiating for their respective customers.
> * After the move, the "component" now is the product (or the service
> of hosting it is) and the customers are the makers of various
> widgets that integrate the component somewhere in their product or
> internal processes, so the component is very much differentiating.
> At this point, the opportunity for cooperation disappears.
>
> I'm not sure any sort of IP strategy can resolve this. The economic 
> forces are overwhelming. I'm not opposed to looking for approaches of 
> course.
>

I'm not sure I understand the problem but the usual place for important 
community open source is a foundation that ensures a fair and equal 
playing field for all involved companies so that they can sleep well 
regarding their investment / dependency on the open source code.

> The bad part: The other side, the hyperscalers, seem to be in cahoots
>> with the vendors, because they also want to see the AGPL considered
>> ineffective.
>>
>> So we have two opposing parties, both claiming the AGPL is no good, for
>> their own reasons, both wrong IMO.
>
> I'm not seeing evidence for this, but perhaps I have missed it. Which 
> hyperscaler(s) is/are *demonstrably* breaching AGPL? (i.e. no casting 
> of aspersions, an actual violation)
>

I doubt any says they are breaching AGPL but folks like Matt not 
speaking for his employer ;-) says copyleft simply doesn't trigger as I 
thought it would.

Cheers, Dirk

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