by jraph | 2025-09-03 14:49:48+00:00
> You didn't seem to actually read the thread I pointed to

I had mentioned it so you could see I actually read it. I had actually made the effort to load this twitter link despite the PITA it is.

> if it did, please point it out

Already pointed out my main qualm, but Brandolini's law is particularly bad with LLMs, I won't have time to debunk in details each time I run into generated text. I'd rather argue with a human being.

Let's forget this part of the discussion, it was not your point, I should have ignored it, I'm just losing patience with the LLM madness.

> effectively violating the freedoms

They don't. There's a fundamental difference between "the license permits something but someone elects to avoid benefiting from it" (someone = big corps) and "the license actually forbids something". The difference is quite major for the rest of us who are not big corps stupidly afraid of the AGPL, and we are the vast majority.

Which resolves your question:

> Why do they get to use "open source" while effectively violating the freedoms but somebody using the Elastic License, or the Sustainable Use License, or the SSPL, or the BSL, or the FSL, etc. isn't allowed to?

The reason is the Elastic License, or the Sustainable Use License, or the SSPL, or the BSL, or the FSL actually forbid running stuff for some endeavors.

AGPL doesn't. We only have big corps deciding they should stay clear from the AGPL. That's not the AGPL forbidding anything to anyone. It's not a feature of AGPL. It's a feature of big corps.

Now, that some people choose the AGPL because they know big corps stay clear from it, okay. I understand you find this veiled. Fine. But that doesn't make AGPL non open source.

Our main disagreement IMHO is that you would like that we qualify licenses depending on the intent of people using it or on the FUD corps who don't like it (and you too!) spread instead of what they intrinsically allow or not. I can't agree with this.

I'll go further. "Sustainable" and "Fair" are terrible and intentionally misleading qualifiers for these non-free licenses that are sustainable and fair only to the authors of the software under those licenses.

You just need to own the fact that you write proprietary software, and shouldn't bitch on people actually doing open source stuff and find them gotchas. They are not doing some anti-competitive stuff that's unfair to you. If you find AGPL gives unfair advantage because it gets called open source, nothing prevents you from adopting it. I suspect you won't because you know it actually gives more rights than you want to give, which also answers your question.

You guys using proprietary licenses are the ones not respecting software freedom, and you trying to call out people who actually do is quite rich. This really doesn't look great. I'd suggest you quit doing this and focus on the positive things instead.

I've asked you what harm the AGPL actually does and all you have to share is some tweet written in jest answering a low quality LLM generated text tickling the gafam. Not very convincing. Not sure you'll find deep meaning in such low quality interactions on such a low quality platform.

Stop spreading the FUD and own your choices.