Re:It's not okay to pretend your software is open source
by Bartweiss on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @11:25AM
(#18337445)
I think this is a lot of people's complaint with the Commons Clause.
It's defended by citing a real problem, but the AGPL also addresses that problem. Meanwhile, its impact on non-Amazon players like "some random user who wants to write and share a handy tool" is much less pleasant, because it effectively turns that user into a free profit source for the license holder.
I can imagine a healthy role for some intermediate license that goes beyond AGPL to say "actually Amazon, you have to pay us for this". But it would need to not distort what FOSS means for everybody the way this does.
It's defended by citing a real problem, but the AGPL also addresses that problem. Meanwhile, its impact on non-Amazon players like "some random user who wants to write and share a handy tool" is much less pleasant, because it effectively turns that user into a free profit source for the license holder.
I can imagine a healthy role for some intermediate license that goes beyond AGPL to say "actually Amazon, you have to pay us for this". But it would need to not distort what FOSS means for everybody the way this does.