Fixed it for you. A lot of people make money by working (or integrating) strongly copylefted software, with results remaining friendly to end-user freedoms.
.. which isn't quite the same thing as itself being Free software. Not that I want to start the license war here.
One provides a way to create a proprietary non-free derivatives/builds, granting more freedom to the non-end-user developers who use the code. Another provides a way to ensure end-users always have certain freedoms.
Debating which is better is meaningless, as it's just a matter of personal preference. We should avoid that.
Say... for an example that resembles the OP project... In a company I work for, we have a FUSE-based (GNU/Linux) filesystem that we use to access Azure Blob Storage like any other mounted network share. A puny tiny project that's a fork of someone else's fork of someone's project, all FOSS (Apache2-licensed, though, not *GPL, but I believe it's irrelevant here), but hope it should still suffice as a quick example. There's literally no reason for us to keep it secret - we're end-user ourselves, enjoying cp and rsync working nicely. Well, maybe not completely nicely - I'm aware there are still some issues with that filesystem, but at least, with the patches, it works OK for us. So, sure, we've put all our changes on GitHub. And, I'm sure, every our developer who had touched the code to solve the problems we had with it got paid for their time. :)
So, I guess, it's every time the engineer is an employee of a company that's an end-user themselves. I think the only case where GPL/AGPL doesn't fit is when you license the software to the end-users to run, and you don't want them to re-distribute and modify software on their own but rely on you for all their needs. And it seems that original project author doesn't fancy this particular business model.
I think a standard GPL license would be an improvement that would keep the intention and avoid some of the larger headaches of the Affero version.
Looks like Dokany is already LGPL/MIT-dual licensed though, so probably would just use that if I were building in this space: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
On the question of why AGPL/GPL and not a more free license like BSD: when I started out the project my intention was to place it under a BSD license. But after working on it for 4-5 months and writing about 25-30 KLOC, with much of it being kernel-mode code I had to reexamine the licensing decision. I did not want to go back on my decision to open source the project, but I also felt that I should see something out of all this hard work (believe me when I say that Windows kernel mode is not fun).
Bill Zissimopoulos
Preference for the MIT license and a wish that the project will reconsider is meant as no indication of a lack of respect. I am sorry you took it that way. This is too good a project not to be under MIT.
In my opinion, good projects like these should always be copylefted. Large projects under liberal licenses are essentially donations by the free software community to proprietary software companies. This results in such companies being able to take advantage of their users in unethical ways using your software. The one thing that free software developers have over proprietary software developers is that we can use copylefted software. It maintains user freedom and maintains the competitive advantage that free software companies and communities have over proprietary software companies.
Personally, as a contributor to open source, I would like my contributions to go to projects that enable and encourage business. I prefer not to make code contributions to projects that cannot freely be used by all, including business. I consider that to be the spirit of open source.
Sure, some businesses will take advantage of Node.js for example because it has an MIT license, but the vast majority will benefit. Startups that build on open source can be more efficient, for the benefit of the customers those businesses exist to serve, honorably, at a profit.
I don't think you do, because all you talk about is how lax free software licenses mean businesses can make money. That's a misunderstanding of how copyleft licenses work. No free software copyleft license says you cannot make money.
> I would like my contributions to go to projects that enable and encourage business.
Many businesses use and develop free software under copyleft licenses. They sell support contracts, it's a very standard model and nothing new.
> I prefer not to make code contributions to projects that cannot freely be used by all
Copyleft's only restriction is that distributors have to respect the freedom of the people the distribute software to. If you're not a distributor, you don't care. If you're a company that distributes proprietary software and cannot even consider distributing free software, then honestly I wouldn't want my software to be part of your products. It's as simple as that.
My main concern is the users of my software. I want to make sure that no distributor or developer can take away the freedoms I intended them to have, and that's what I care about.
> Startups that build on open source can be more efficient
And what's wrong with that free software being copyleft in that instance? They are taking advantage of very large amounts of human effort to be "more efficient". The least they can do is make their modifications freely available to people they give their software to. And even better would be if they realised that liberating their software is a net benefit to everyone involved. But most startups (unfortunately) don't care about software freedom.
> honorably, at a profit.
No part of any free software license requires that you cannot charge money for the software or services. Nor does any free software license state that you cannot make a profit. These are strawmen.
I think most startups do care, and have cared. And even if some didn't, then I wouldn't want to introduce any potential for them to be forced on the issue with a lawsuit.
What do you think of the ZFS/Linux licensing issue? Surely ZFS would have seen broader adoption if not considered a derivative of the kernel by the GPL?
Maybe since I'm not in that space, that's why I haven't have seen that.
> What do you think of the ZFS/Linux licensing issue?
I am sad that Sun decided to make a GPL-incompatible license. However, a better question is "would there be proprietary ZFS forks if ZFS wasn't under a copyleft license". I can think of at least one company that would have such a fork and that alone is worth not making it permissively licensed. Same argument goes for DTrace, which has been ported to several proprietary operating systems (but you can get their modified versions of DTrace). At the same time, the CDDL isn't as strong as it should be but it's inconvenient enough that practically most companies won't bother to make a proprietary fork.
Overall, while it sucks for the GNU/Linux community IMO the net benefit for free software is greater (you can use illumos or even FreeBSD which incldues ZFS).
> if not considered a derivative of the kernel by the GPL?
I don't think anyone thinks of ZFS as a derivative work of the Linux kernel. The translation layer definitely would be, but nobody could seriously think a project almost as old as Linux and developed completely separately would be classified as a "derivative work" of Linux. DTrace is a separate topic.
Yes, I wouldn't have thought so either, but the legal technicalities hinged on this, and this was the opinion of many, including Richard Stallman. He stated there was no way that ZFS could be bundled with a Linux distribution without infringing on the GPL. Ubuntu sought separate legal opinion and concluded differently. They are now shipping ZFS as part of their distribution. I think this is an example of why some people are averse to the GPL. Right-spirited use of GPL software could risk exposure to a lawsuit. I guess this could be called the "ten foot pole" argument in favor of more permissive licenses.
Users of GPL'd software will never be sued. It's developers and distributors that choose to create software using components with conflicting licenses. In my opinion, the benefits for users far outweigh the annoyances of developers.
The reason Richard Stallman presumably claims that ZFS is a derivative work is because otherwise the strength of the GPL would be perceived as being weaker. It was a political play IMO, not one from the standpoint of ethics. Though, it would be fair to say that if you create a translation layer for Linux that would be a derivative work of Linux but because of how it would be used it would also require licensing ZFS under the GPL (because the two pieces of software are intricately linked). So it's possibly true that there would be an effective violation of the GPL.
> I guess this could be called the "ten foot pole" argument in favor of more permissive licenses.
On the other hand, users are also not protected from developers or distributors creating modified versions of your work that are not free software. I guess that could be called the "protection of freedom" argument in favour of stronger copyleft licenses.
I hope they will soon switch to MIT.