> The GPL is meant to be viral

But that also makes people not wanna bother with it. People in the middle who doesn't care either way will be very apprehensive of putting in a license virus in their project.

This is a very business-centric viewpoint. I publish a small number of open-source libraries. They are not a business. I have no interest in making them a business. In fact, the idea of making them a business is repellent. They're just code for doing some tasks more easily than starting from scratch.

I made some of them because I needed them, and had no reason to own them. I made some because I thought another library was poorly designed and I could demonstrate a better way. I didn't make any because I wanted money or recognition. I don't care who uses them, or how. It is literally impossible for a user to do anything with any of them that harms me.

I am deeply suspicious of any world view that declares it bad when people use code I have released for free. I released it so people would use it. Good for them!

> Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.

It's only unsustainable when you are interested in keeping "user" and "developer" as distinct sets.

> The hyperscalers aren't giving back 1/1,000,000th of what they've taken. Yet we go after "source available" or "fair source" like it's some grave evil.

No we are going after it when people try to pass it off as open source when it really isn't.

I like open source because it means I'm not beholden to the original developer in any way as long as I pay it forward. I'm OK if this means you can't find a profitable business model.

Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...

The hyperscalers are contributors to FOSS, both in code contributions and funding. They could easily far better though.

> Protecting the user's right to run the software for free on their own or in their company so long as they don't resell it

One company uses the software internally to create more value for a customer of theirs.

A second company uses the software internally to provide a paid service to a customer.

A third company resells software they bought to their customer.

The end result is the same: Company makes money, customer exhanges money for value. Somehow only one or two of those use cases would be legal.

> Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.

I agree with you, actually - but Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement more generally really don't. They exactly and explicitly believe this right exists and should ideally be a legal right, and the AGPL quite explicitly maintains this right.

Ultimately the Free Software movement is predicated on the concept that ideas can't be owned. They generally oppose both copyright and patents, and not just for software. Their licenses are meant as a stop gap solution. Ideally to them, or at least to some of the more die-hard members, laws would be changed such that what the GPL grants would not be a license predicated on copyright, but instead a legal requirement for all software, while copyright would be entirely abolished.

In addition to their general opposition to copyright and patents, Free Software people also view software as having a special role in terms of privacy and control - that, even more so than books and other copyrightable works, you have a right to know what the software in your house and business is doing, and to modify and fix it if it's doing something you don't like. This is related to privacy rights on one hand, and also anti-monopoly, right to repair concepts on the other hand.

This is all very different from the Open Source movement, even though they basically use the same kinds of licenses. The OpenSource movement is more of an industry group that believes competing on building much foundational software is a waste of resources. Instead, they believe the best way to build this foundational software is in collaboration with other commercial or non-commercial entities, building it in the open such that all may benefit from contributions and add their own contributions. However, the Open Source movement is completely fine with, and even expects, then making a proprietary product on top of this open source base.

To them copyleft licenses are a tool to make sure others don't keep their improvements for themselves, but have the downside of making it harder to build your proprietary stuff on top. Conversely, software that takes your contributions but then doesn't allow you to use it in commercial offerings is completely unacceptable, since the whole goal of the movement is for different companies to build a common infra on which they can then build their own commercial products.

Ultimately, both the Free Software and the Open Source movements will agree that a core part of open source is that anyone should be able to compete on delivering the original software, even if for entirely different ideological reasons.

The AGPL makes it so those users can be the same ones as the ones writing code.

How would that ever be enforced? Do you not run into WinRAR/Sublime problem of "ey you've been using this, pay us, please"?

…until businesses decided that the GPLv2 was legally risky and businesses started to avoid it.

As a BSD developer from the 90s, that does not reflect my experience.

We wanted our code to be as widely used as possible. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

There was always tension between the folks that shipped GPL software and folks that shipped BSD/MIT software, but the dividing line was not whether or not we were “commercial programmers and startup bros”.

It has always come down to questions of what we believe freedom to mean, how we wanted to contribute utility to the world, and whether we saw the use of our software in commercial projects as a loss to ourselves in a zero sum game.

The rise of “software as a service” has changed that calculus for some, and disadvantaged those that sought to build commercial service entities around their open source software. In the areas that I work, it’s made no material difference.

As for Ruby on Rails, I think it’s outsized presence on hacker news might have given you an inaccurate picture of its influence on the broader open source ecosystem.

I think the companies themselves changed. Google used to be much less evil.

The problem with GPL was "tainting." It was never clear in what cases you could use GPL without it dragging all your code into being freely available. LGPL was supposed to help with that; AGPL made it even worse. The lawyers were terribly confused and recommended you just not use anything with "GPL" in the license.

The reason why MIT/BSD licenses flourished is that they were easy to understand. As long as you didn't sue the original author or try to claim the code was written by you, you were free to do almost anything with it, including mixing it in with other for-profit code.

Whether that's an abomination or a blessing depends on your corporate vs. free software politics.

(All personal opinion, etc.)

I'm not actually sure what a better way to square the circle of not making the large entities that have developed a weird patronage relationship with open source projects run away while also avoiding the kinds of problem that the GPLv3 and AGPL are hoping to deal with, would be. Limiting the virality scope might be beneficial there, but I'm not sure how you would word that in a way that's not gameable.

It feels like we've wound up in a weird position where because so many GPLv2 projects moved to GPLv3, companies were startled into paying attention to the risks involved in a new license with open questions about how it would shake out in actual courts, as well as being jolted to the very real possibility it could happen again, and took the path of risk reduction by moving toward platforms where that couldn't happen.

You might compare it to everyone pointing to Solaris's source closing as a reason to not trust Oracle about MySQL's license remaining GPLv2. (As it turned out, so far, they haven't changed the license, but there was certainly a lot of fearmongering about that at the time.)

So I think I agree that it's not so much a coordinated effort to steer anything as the direct effects of companies avoiding funding that space, as well as the knock-on effect that anyone whose goals involve large companies using their product and leveraging that avoids picking a license that precludes that in turn.