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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