News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why we’re changing to the AGPL license. Parent comment

Re:Why we’re changing to the AGPL license by mtlynch on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @08:11AM (#24764784)
I didn't mean to present it as if it's immoral to choose a license that excludes Googlers. The maintainer should be free to choose whatever license meets their goals.

Out of personal self-interest, I want to maximize the number of people who are eligible to contribute to my project. If it's unlikely for anyone to use my code to compete against me or form a different business without compensating me, I default to a permissive license because it allows more people to contribute.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why we’re changing to the AGPL license by enriquto on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @08:51AM (#24765088)
> a license that excludes Googlers.

This is not the case. The AGPL license does not exclude googlers. It's Google that excludes googlers.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why we’re changing to the AGPL license by eeZah7Ux on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @08:55AM (#24765118)
> choose a license that excludes Googlers

This is entirely google's decision. It's obviously not a decision made to help FLOSS or FLOSS developers.

> Out of personal self-interest, I want to maximize the number of people who are eligible to contribute to my project.

I don't want to maximize the number of organizations taking my software, locking it down, renaming it and ultimately competing AGAINST my user community.

[ Parent | on HN ]