> Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it.

The free solution to this is Affero GPL. The AGPL ensures that anyone who hosts a program must grant its users the same rights to use, examine, modify and share it that he received. The original author can just download that source and incorporate its changes.

That means that a fork doesn’t hide changes from the original author who ‘poured so much love’ into it.

We as a community have got to stop using the MIT or BSD licenses on our code. Use the AGPL for server code, the GPL for tools and the LGPL for libraries.

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NullCascade 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Use the AGPL for server code, the GPL for tools and the LGPL for libraries.

If we are doing it for ideological reasons why not go all in and use AGPLv3 for everything, including libraries? It also has the added benefit that big corporations will not use your code.

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delfinom 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh? Big players still run AGPL licensed services. The concern is not about the access to source code.

The concern is livelihood. When a big player swoops in, they can completely decimate your business because of shear scale advantages, they can undercut you into bankruptcy. And while sharing the source under even GPL is noble, it's just also kneecapping your ability to make and grow a new business if it's a tool/service that has market traction. The OG author having access to that modified source code does absolutely nothing to help them.

The big players are literally seagulls waiting to steal your current and future customers.

	▲	imiric 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The concern is not about the access to source code. That is a big part of the concern, yes. That anyone can copy your work, setup a competitor, and never give anything back. Copyleft licenses, and the AGPL in particular, ensure that those changes are made public, which benefits everyone, including the original project. > When a big player swoops in, they can completely decimate your business because of shear scale advantages, they can undercut you into bankruptcy. That's not a guarantee. In fact, many businesses built around copyleft licensed products can thrive, in ways that their competitors cannot. The original authors understand the code base, the product, and their users much better. They have first-mover advantage on any new features, and have full control over the project's direction. They can use these advantages to build a business that is difficult to compete with, even for much larger and more powerful competitors. In the open source world, the value of a company hinges on the quality of its product and the community around it, not on market hype, speculative valuations, and venture capital. It is more difficult to build unicorns and make investors rich with this approach, but focusing on the user avoids many of the wrong incentives that make most companies user hostile. Many companies fail because the leadership doesn't understand this, nor the philosophy behind open source, and they simply want to use it as a marketing tactic.