I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole.

There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected!

The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys.

I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.

I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party

Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...

It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.

> which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party

Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)

Big companies will rather ignore your project than use an AGPL licensed product. For them it's just not worth the hassle.

Maybe 1 out a 1 billion software is so revolutionary that licenses be damned. But maybe we should temper our expectations a bit around the software we build!

Interesting, I might write my software under AGPL but still I guess some questions arise as if sure the big companies might not use my project but some smaller companies can still create an competing product.

As an example immich is an AGPL based software which has its own instance and then https://pixelunion.eu (I think gives more free stuff like 16 gig instance etc) and then competes with immich itself

They can do this because they release any changes they make or they don't change it that much .

> Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)

What I want is if someone uses my open source product and then uses it to create an competing product, I am under no obligation to release it under a foss and much rather then release it under an source available license

The type of audience Immich targets, pretty fundamentally limits the appeal of any hosted solution, unlike a lot of the infrastructure-type of project a lot of these "big cloud taking my code" complaints come from.

That's why SSPL was created. People working in tech companies have expressed extreme vitriol for SSPL - I wonder why.

The SSPL isn't the best designed license, but it is "more AGPL than AGPL"

SSPL doesn't help with the real problem that SSPL/etc companies complain about though; that AWS won't give you money when they turn your software into a service and will compete with you to reduce your income.

Of course, the license is kind of irrelevant to that situation, Amazon will just reimplement your stuff from scratch if it is popular enough.

Okay? You might as well not make it easy for them by letting them copy your software verbatim? What's this argument that since life isn't fair you might as well just give up and help the evil people? People following this argument are one reason evil people are so powerful.

Why? What is meaningful about sharing code with the threat of a lawsuit if someone copies it? Is sounds like you want the term to be erroded?

To explain where I'm coming from a bit more, my thinking is something like:

"open source" where crucial parts of making a system work, or where the project scoops up eager contributors and them schisms the community once it's finished using their work, tends to have a negative effect.

If those projects were more explicitly either "closed source"/"source accessible" etc, then the open source community could focus their efforts on projects that actually embraced genuine openness and hackability.

Of course - I'd rather there was more actual open source. But what I really want is for "open source" to be some marker saying "this is a project that's open and built by/for the community".

User consent. Uninformed consent is not consent.

You cannot meaningfully consent to running software on your devices, or running your life on software, when that software's source is unavailable.

Why does that require there to be 'less open source'? Nothing is stopping that already today. Impact wise, everyday people can't use build tooling so this kind of thing only effects people that are 1 keystroke away from modifying the code and not being allowed to share it.