I'm not saying they're right, but I think the point was that:

- GPL code can be used in a program you do not distribute

- Not distributing can be done by running it on a server instead of local machines

- Run on server almost always means users don't own data

It's missing a step, which is that the GPL code in the world was so important that people NEEDED to use it so much that they were willing to change the way they distribute (or don't) their software... that's a pretty tough claim to make out. What's the evidence for that?

I don’t understand your bit at the end but I just wanted to mention that the AGPL license was created by the FSF in 2002 to address this network loophole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

And recently made irrelevant by Amazon, who discovered how to defeat its purpose while fully respecting its terms (copy the code without any contributions back to the authors, so you don't get any sharing back; do all of the hard work of deployment logic in code you do not share, ensuring people can't really move to self-hosting if they want to patch the software in any way).

The AGPL is one of the strangest licenses to me, coming from a foundation that considers running code you can't read or modify as a violation of your human rights, but also making a license designed for software running on someone else's computer entirely, where you have no possibility of any amount of control.

That is not the purpose of the AGPL. If you were trying to use the AGPL as some kind of trojan horse to get access to someone's deployment code, then it should be no surprise that it didn't work. Perhaps your codebase is just hard to contribute to? Is it possible your company has not given enough incentive towards outside developers for them to contribute back? It doesn't even have to be money, it starts with making some mutually beneficial promises and then sticking to them.

In general I think it is wrong to try and characterize Amazon's developers as being some kind of strange beasts who have somehow figured out how to use open source better than everyone else. They are the same as every other corporate developer in that they'll always take the easiest and cheapest path to success.

The purpose of the AGPL as envisioned by Stallman is to give you as a user of the network-based software some of the same freedoms that you would have as a user of a local GPL program.

This would include the freedom to know what code is running,and the freedom to modify that code and run you own version. The ideal outcome of someone running an AGPL server would be that if you find a bug or if they decide to terminate the service, you can host your own version, so you are not locked in.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this freedom is very hard to actually guarantee, as the deployment and monitoring of a server can be as daunting as the actual application logic itself. This is somewhat similar to the case of releasing GPL code without the instructions for building that code, but probably far worse.

You seem to have assumed I am personally someone who was bitten by this, which is not the case. I am not even a firm believer in FLOSS values. I am just a by-stander observing how these things are used in practice as opposed to their ideals.

By the way, even Mongo's initial use of the AGPL was somewhat counter to the spirit of the thing - they also believed that the deployment part is going to be too hard for many companies, so they hoped that companies would come to them to pay for hosted deployments. If they were using the AGPL according to its spirit, they could have made their own deployment and monitoring scripts public and would have defeated Amazon's lock-in attempts that way (of course they could never do that, their whole purpose was to create that lock-in effect for themselves).

> Proprietary software is undeniably immoral.

One of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Also a complete failure to understand the philosophy behind the success of FLOSS.

Generic problems that are widely shared with limited variations in functional need are successful FLOSS solutions or platforms.

Specific problems that are more nuanced and meet niche requirements are what works best in commercial software.

It philosophically makes no sense to call something immoral because a subset of entities are happy to pay for it to achieve their goals. Symbiotically most FLOSS is supported by these solutions which are often based on them.

> It philosophically makes no sense to call something immoral because a subset of entities are happy to pay for it to achieve their goals.

Paying or not paying has nothing to do with the immorality of proprietary software.

You can pay for software even if it is not proprietary.

I suggest you to watch any talk by Richard Stallman, if you want to understand why some people think proprietary software to be immoral. You might not agree, but for sure it is not something that "philosophically makes no sense".

>You can pay for software even if it is not proprietary

You can, hardly anyone does though. Donate buttons make a pittance. Nearly all the times I've given one I get back an almost embarrassingly grateful response because A. the amount I give is always a small fraction of the value I've gained and B. it's obviously a rare event for the receiver.

Donate button is not the only option though. You don't have to publicly host binaries or sourcecode for your product - only make them available after payment (ardour for example requires payment to access pre-built binaries).

And offering paid support or development is not unheard of either.

My software interacts with other commercial software in a very loose way. It just calls the other software passing some arguments. The first thing you see appearing when that opens up is who it's licensed to. I've seen the same licensee's name appear numerous times. As I said I work in a niche and these guys have WhatsApp groups and the like and pass stuff around. A group of them formed a brand, just a common website really, and then tried to beat me down on support costs despite the fact that forming this group had zero effect on my workload,same number of shops, same separate workforces. They don't always activate Windows, I doubt if their MS Office is always legal, they skimp on general tech support and try to get me to do that for free cos if their network is down my software doesn't work properly so it's my problem. One of them who's still my customer did try and pirate my software in a new shop and it was a few months before he had to come clean because it was obvious that support calls were coming from two locations over a hundred miles apart which had the same licence. If these guys had the source code the first thing they'd do is hire someone in India and see if he could replace me.

That sounds like a real fun customer group (which I personally would try to get rid of asap).

And open source vs. closed source doesn't really drastically change anything here, since you could just charge support per installation (and they could try to lie about how many installations there are, etc.).

That's small businesses for you. Not all of them are like that by any means but enough are to be difficult to consider losing, income wise, with no guarantee I could replace them. As I said, if they had the source code, I think they'd try and exploit some third world coder to both maintain and extend the product and say goodbye to me

> I think they'd try and exploit some third world coder to both maintain and extend the product and say goodbye to me

Care to elaborate on that statement?

Is there something wrong with jobs at local market rates? No different to how you are paid.

People who are willing to pirate software other people in their industry pay for, want to pay zero if they can. It's all about cheap.

Donate buttons are a joke when used for software. They never worked. Now I see a different type of support in video streamers on Twitch or YouTube. Perhaps there is a way to apply this concept to software vendors...

> I suggest you to watch any talk by Richard Stallman, if you want to understand why some people think proprietary software to be immoral. You might not agree, but for sure it is not something that "philosophically makes no sense".

Yea, I've met Stallman, been to plenty of his talks and had this same discussion for the last 15-20 years. Thanks for the advice though.

> immorality of proprietary software.

I don't believe it is. Plenty of others accept a perfectly valid dual magisteria as I proposed. Even in the commonly cited logically incongruous value systems that redefine the baseline of ethics I think that view can be accommodated.

But the blanket statement that "proprietary software is immoral" is fundamentally broken

And that is why Desktop Linux will never happen, too much immoral software is required for it to ever happen.

Software engineers not only do exist on my home country, it is a professional title protected by law, not something that one calls themselves after a six week bootcamp.

I don't see how those two are connected in any way. There exists plenty of proprietary software for linux as well - it's not like there is anything on the linux desktop platform that prevents this from existing?

The fight back from the community that makes such companies loose interest in GNU/Linux, specially the attack of FOSS clones.

This doesn't make much sense.. the FOSS clones also exist on Windows and OSX.

And lots of Windows software isn't available on OSX either (and vice versa).. How are you gonna blame that on the FOSS community?

Except that those communities are willing to pay for software.

Announce any "evil proprietary" software in places like HN, which should be about doing business to start with, and the top comments happen to be about forking, making FOSS clones and not paying a dime to evil overloards.

Qt being discussed here is a very good example, tons of comments on how not to pay Qt, switch to alternatives, and how much evil they are for wanting remuneration for their work.

Naturally companies then turn into the Apple, Google and Microsoft customer communities instead.

You are forgetting that so far qt is dual-licensed under GPL and commercial license so far. And there are a lot of FOSS projects that happen to use qt under the GPL so far. And for those projects there really is no other option than forking Qt or switching to alternatives if they stop providing the GPL licensed version for future version, since it would turn the FOSS project into a commercial one.

You are essentially arguing that making software available for Linux as well increases the probability of FOSS clones. I would argue the inverse, since the motivation to create a FOSS clone is much higher if such software doesn't exist at all for a given platform (since some people will just buy the software and be done with it).

My own experience is that trying to sell software to GNU/Linux customers is a lost battle, unless it is behind a server wall.

I've paid for plenty of GNU/Linux software. It has to be Free Software though, otherwise I'm not interested.

The confirmation that "evil proprietary business" companies should just focus on customers using Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms.

Thus giving the maximum possible motivation for people to develop their own (FOSS or not) clones/implementations. Bonus points for including actively hostile things like DRM or requiring license servers or hardware tokens to improve the user experience.

My users who pay me for my proprietary software also get support from me. Frequently I see pirated software on their machines. I have no doubt that they'd pay me nothing given the opportunity. That's owner operated small businesses for you. You seem to have some utopian ideal where everyone is a giver but that's not the real world.

The world doesn't owe you a business plan. If your business fundamentally relies on your users having no way to fix the bugs in the software you are selling them (which is what it means for software to be proprietary), then that is an immoral business.

Assuming you write open source software, how do you persuade people to pay for it?

SaaS model like GitLab but I read here yesterday that community edition != paid/enterprise edition. GPL license for free use. Charge for commercial use like Qt ... but apperently this is not working well.

The paid/enterprise-only extensions are still immoral though? How do you completely eliminate immorality from your software/service, other than charging only for technical support and prioritized bugfix? (I take it that's you were concerned regarding community edition != paid/enterprise edition)

I don't think any of those models would work in the small business sector that I provide niche software for. The big open source projects supported by the likes of Facebook etc work because writing software is something Facebook do as an aid to their business rather than it being their business per se. So contributing to open source software is purely a way of reducing their own costs and maybe getting some kudos. If your fundamental business is writing software that you need to sell to people then making it open source makes as much sense as a corner shop operating on an honour system.

One of the key ones in that list is advertising supported software, which is in my opinion less moral than proprietary software. Android and Chrome fit squarely into that bucket.

Some people have a need for a product. Someone provides a solution under some terms.

Assuming the terms and prices are fair and no "bad practices" are going on (no excessive EULA/DRM, no ads, no enforced subscriptions, no online requirement, etc.), how is that immoral?

The world does not owe devs a business model, you are right. The same way, the world does not owe users a solution under whatever terms they want, either.

> Assuming the terms and prices are fair and no "bad practices" [...] no excessive EULA/DRM

I think there's an argument to be made that the work that compilers perform might as well be DRM. Granted, the obfuscating effect of source-to-binary translation is in most cases incidental to the compiler's main purpose, but it's an effect that can be felt nonetheless.

Why would a user care about the source code?

It is like people going to the cinema expecting to be given all the details, including technical documents and whatnot about how the movie was made.

> Why would a user care about the source code?

If there's a bug, the user can fix it only if the source code is available.

> It is like people going to the cinema expecting to be given all the details, including technical documents and whatnot about how the movie was made.

Well, movies do include credits, detailing who did what. From there, you could research what the "what" is and know more or less how the movie was made.

Disclaimer: I have no care either way between OSS or commercial software, beyond liking to contribute and support OSS projects, and working on proprietary applications (and being generally ok with it). So I'm replying not with an intent to proselytize; just thought I could address your points.

Another HNer participating in one of the site's favorite pastimes: moving the goalposts. Hooray.

> Assuming the terms and prices are fair and no "bad practices" are going on (no excessive EULA/DRM, no ads, no enforced subscriptions, no online requirement, etc.), how is that immoral?

The point is that proprietary software is inherently that kind of bad practice - it means users can't fix bugs they encounter, or can't share their bugfixes. This is particularly vexing when the vendor also disclaims all warranties on the software, which is usual practice - reserving the right to sell something broken and unfixable.

Compare e.g. car right-to-repair laws that require manufacturers to make their repair manuals available.

Thanks for calling my way of living immoral and then not having the decency to answer my question to you about how do it in a way that would mean I could ensure I get paid for coding and not get stolen from.

I mean, I work on custom software that my clients use in-house; my clients always get full source code and I bill them for my time. But I doubt that's particularly relevant to your situation.

I don't know what would work for you. If you're doing in-person support for your users, that may well be a lot more valuable than the software itself. Maybe that's a viable business, or maybe it isn't. Again, the world doesn't owe you a business model. If you're selling shrink-wrapped software then my honest opinion is that that business is dying (with or without the open-source movement) and it's better to get out of it.

Software Freedom Conservancy folks have good explanations for this, check their video presentations for arguments. Tl;dr a pacemaker runs a software that could be fixed with an update, but you don't have the rights to do this, no one has, since the company is already out of business, so the patient is screwed. That's a drastic example but clearly shows why the proprietary software is immoral.

I'd have no problems providing source code if I thought the people I was dealing with would behave in a moral manner with it, to use your term.

No, it does not show anything. You are picking an extreme example in a heavily regulated field and trying to prove a general point with it. It is the knife fallacy again.

If pacemakers really need software updates, then regulate that companies are required to provide the updates or release the code if unable to do so for any reason.

> Proprietary software is undeniably immoral.

At this point no discussion can be had as it depends on a persons own beliefs which are rarely changed by fact or argument. This also skips over any nuance concerning the benefits, costs, and externalities of a particular subject.

Google and Microsoft are some of the biggest contributors to free software in the world. Free software is mostly a way for huge companies to cooperate on IP, at this moment, or roughly equivalent to shareware for smaller companies who want to give you a taste of the software before you have to commit to buying.

There are definitely many exceptions, such as Mozilla and GNU and others, but some of the highest profile software fall in either the first category (Linux, Clang, Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, OpenJDK, PostgreSQL) or the second (old AGPL MongoDB, ElasticSearch, CentOS).

Getting paid for working is immoral too in your own logic.

Why? That's a total non sequitor. Free Software is not about being paid or not, its about how software is distributed.

I agree somewhat. But you have to realize that developing and maintaining software is incredibly expensive and time consuming. I, for example, hate Android for spying on me all the time, but I realize that developing such a complicated operating system takes a lot of effort and Google isn't doing this out of altruism.