HAhardwaresofton·Dec 9, 2020
Here are some more thoughts:
I'm also wondering if it's even worth bothering with this at all and whether companies should just open source the orchestration software/shim layer. Open sourcing the shim/adapter you use to orchestrate running the unmodified software doesn't even seem to be an issue, because usually what's stopping competitors is not simply development difficulty. Then the question becomes how far past the orchestration does the virality go -- I think it's pretty hard to make a case that your customer frontend (which is where the money gets made) that calls out to the orchestration software (maybe it doesn't even, maybe it just puts a message on a queue) is now a work derived from the Program.
Here's a more concrete example. If I want to run a hosted mongo service, I can take mongodb's own k8s operator[0] and build using tha
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t. For this to be damaging to the business, the virality of AGPL would have to extend all the way to whatever software I use to check out customers, but even that seems like it would be fine if that software was open source too (imagine some self-hostable saas project that takes your stripe key as an ENV variable).
Here's another thing worth considering -- who is going to sue companies that violate? Some random group of developers? The EFF/FSF + a developer? when are they going to sue you? By the time that you're a giant company off of the software, even if a competitor got the complete source code to one, two or all services that run on your platform, could they really replicate it? Wouldn't they still have to get that source from a customer (user) that requested the source?
It seems that if you really want to stop this from happening, something like the Business Source License[1] (or some equivalent license) or bust.
Aside from all this, it really feels like AGPL is the best license for all software -- it really hits the "don't use this if you will improve it but not contribute back" intention perfectly -- if you make your derived work public (such that your modified version becomes the unmodified version) it seems like there are little to no issues running a business on it.
[0]: https://github.com/mongodb/mongodb-kubernetes-operator
[1]: https://mariadb.com/bsl11