Licenses intended to be viral and poisonous are avoided by companies interested in ownership over their own IP. Huge shocker.

What do you mean by "poisonous"?

It's just a classic F.U.D (fear, uncertainty and doubt) tactic

They are intentionally dangerous to unwitting license holders who wield them wrong.

I suppose it's about the patent clause.

> viral and poisonous

Viral, perhaps if you integrate a library, but in this case it doesn't make sense, you only need to distribute source code if you modify it. Poisonous makes no sense to me, can you clarify?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poisonous

1. DESTRUCTIVE, HARMFUL

...

3. SPITEFUL, MALICIOUS

In what ways is the GPL or AGPL destructive or harmful or spiteful or malicious? I find it the exact opposite of all those concepts.

It’s not, except to people who want to use GPLed software without holding up their end of the bargain.

Can they hurt you if you accidentally use them without understanding the consequences?

Hmm, it sounds to me like so much of our world is poison, then. Most surveillance-capitalism software (so the bulk of the most popular websites) are for example poisonous then, no? Unless you'd like to argue that unintentionally turning yourself into a research subject isn't really harmful, in which case I argue accidentally using a license that requires you to share any licensed code you change to also not really be harmful.

You can do whatever you want with your code, you just really shouldn't act surprised when people avoid it so it can't hurt them. They don't see the tradeoff as being worth it. Maybe they don't in the other cases you are presenting as "poisonous" but in those situations they either aren't aware that it's posoin or they are aware and think that it's worth the tradeoff. Regardless, businesses have pretty much universally decided to avoid. I think that speaks volumes.

> Regardless, businesses have pretty much universally decided to avoid. I think that speaks volumes.

I don't typically make my decisions based on what businesses "universally decide" (have they actually?). Most businesses are shareholder or private corporations that find margin between labor and sales; I instead structured a business as a co-op and that seems to be working just fine. Many businesses profit off polluting the environment or selling weapons; I've never worked DoD or O&G (and never will) and lead an extraordinarily comfortable and privileged life regardless. Many content creator businesses lock their content behind paywalls, riddle their sites with ads and tracking; I put up a simple blog in html and css and my audience might be small but they are engaged and are in conversation with me.

I'm not trying to say i'm a special ethical snowflake that's better than everyone else, I'm saying I don't really take it as a given that "businesses doing things in a certain" way really means much of anything at all. In fact I've found often profit correlates with harm (and that businesses often make decisions that don't lead to long, long-term profits but rather pillage themselves for short-term profits), O&G being a great example, so I might even be able to take "businesses do it that way" as a warning to not do it that way or I might be hurting people.

I think you're taking my criticism of the license as an indictment of your personal licensing decisions. I don't really have a problem with you licensing your software the way you choose to. You mainly seem to take issue with the word "poison", that's how I see these licenses, but it was never intended to be about the morality of using them. I'm also not talking about whether businesses are being moral in their other practices unrelated to licensing, I am just saying it's NOT shocking or surprising that they avoid potentially harmful (to them) licenses even if they could maybe save money by doing so. Even if you think that they AREN'T harmful (to the businesses) that's clearly not the perception they have, otherwise companies are leaving free money on the table which I doubt most informed companies are willing to do.

I don't care to continue the conversation where you justify your actions to me, it's just not necessary. I just wish we would stop acting like it's confusing or we don't understand why businesses respond the way that they do when confronted with the decision to use AGPL software.

Maybe it's just a messaging/marketing problem, I don't know.

If you don't distribute the program you don't need to care that it's built with GPL dependencies.

The entire point of the AGPL is to close this 'hole.' The AGPL is not the GPL.

Ah I missed it was AGPL

One of the most notable examples is Google.

Pity. They said it’s because they’re afraid someone outside Google would use it, which is legitimate for companies without sufficient technical SBOL controls to prevent using third party software in violation of its terms. Their take is basically “we don’t have a way to keep our internal software internal, so you can’t use it at all, ever, for anything”. I wouldn’t have expected that of them.

That makes sense. GPL 3 is basically a non-starter for people that ship hardware, but is fine for people that provide web services.

AGPL would level the playing field between Google and device manufacturers and on-prem software companies (like Apple and Microsoft).

Of course they don’t want their employees to use and indirectly support that ecosystem!

I wish they’d produce a GPL 4 that is closer to the AGPL. v3 backfired and is severely hurting end-users’ freedom in practice.

I know, but why?

Due to their size, they must have one of the best legal department in the world. Also, their core business is search, and data processing in general. They have the means of using such software and doing what it takes to comply with the licence without putting themselves in trouble.

My guess is simply that they don't want to. They prefer to rewrite it, which will allow them to monetize their tools as proprietary software later. They are already overstaffed with some of the best developers, they can rewrite stuff, and they don't really need help from the open source community, that's why they don't release under copyleft themselves.