AGPL is a license qualifying the criteria of OSI's OpenSource definition and FSF's Free Software definition.

A key point there is that a user can use the software quite freely without restrictions only with the caveat that modifications have to be made available to users. (AGPL is slighqtly more complex)

Many of the "modern" licenses allow to look at code, but prevent distribution and/or modification and/or usage. They typically aim for any "proper" usage requiring a commercial license and not giving the guarantee that code can be fixed in case the original vendor stops working on it.

Another major issue is remixing and license compatibility. AGPL is part of an ecosystem. Anything MIT, BSD, current GPL, etc. will freely mix with AGPL.

Most of the other licenses, I can't use in any of my projects without running into license compatibility issues.

Notably AGPL is also DFSG free, meaning that AGPL licensed software can be included in Debian and its derivatives. I believe its also fine in other major distros (RHEL/SuSE etc).

I don't value OSI's stamp of approval since they were explicitly founded to coopt FSF's effort and make it more corporate friendly. Obviously corporate lawyers would disagree with me.

A license that allows all typical freedoms except "use the software to start a SaaS using proprietary infrastructure" is fine by me.

While there are significant ideological disagreements between the OSI and FSF, when it comes to FOSS licenses their definitions are mostly equivalent. There are very few licenses that are recognized by the OSI but not by the FSF, and vice-versa.

Proprietary infrastructure = All infrastructure essentially.

So you're fine with a license that can't be used for SaaS. So basically you're happy for the commercial internet to be powered by proprietary software - with all that would mean for free software.

That's pretty much the same as AGPL. A tell about OSI's biases is that AGPL and SSPL are basically the same but since Amazon's propaganda engine ramped up against SSPL it was labeled as somehow completely out of bounds.

How are they pretty much the same? AGPL only require the changes to the software itself to be shared under AGPL and it's apply the same requirement for everyone.

SSPL require to release source code for every piece of your infrastructure if your business model seems like Amazon. This is descrimination which both FSF and OSI are not allow.

> AGPL and SSPL are basically the same

Are you serious? Once you look past the most superficial level, they're not even close.

I don't care so much about the AGPL specifically, but it's a single known license, rather than every time I find a new project having to find out what "interesting" license they cooked up this time.

yes but afaict SSPL was kiiinda becoming a de facto "f off AWS" license that was generally becoming standard. thats all any of these vendors want, they're not coming up with new licenses just for shits and giggles.

standards evolve over time, it was entirely possible that Grafana could have thrown its weight behind SSPL and helped legitimize it more.

> Grafana could have thrown its weight behind SSPL and helped legitimize it more.

Which would not have been a good thing in any way, so I'm glad they didn't do that.

This would've been nice. I think we are not far from the OSI having to recognize that SSPL is the future whether they like it or not, and possibly moving from obstructionist to a more constructive point, where they help evolve the SSPL to address their concerns, while recognizing that it is a copyleft open source license.

A license doesn't get to be called open source just because it's popular. Look how popular Windows is. Is it open source too?

The only thing that differs between SSPL and the AGPL in terms of being open source or not is that one particular group of people has decided one is Open Source(TM) and one is not.

> one particular group of people

I assume you mean the OSI. But it's not just them with a problem with the SSPL. Debian and Fedora both reject it too, independently, for being non-free.

But it is free. It solely conveys an expectation that you also release related tooling for free as well. If it's not a free license, the AGPL isn't either.

What's your definition of "free"? Because it's certainly not the same as the FSF's.

It closes the server loophole in which companies will use and modify Free software they're using just on their servers, but never make those changes available to clients, which is not restricted by just the regular GPL.