I agree with much of this, but mainly on their sales and marketing tactics.

However, what does your rationale for finding them reprehensible have to do with the article? The Affero GPL/GPLv3 is arguably the most open source license available.

The Affero GPL has a clause requiring the operators of network servers that use AGPL code to provide full source of the network server. Berkley DB is used in, amongst other places, Subversion - so when they next do a distro upgrade in a few months, a whole bunch of developers are going to find they're no longer license compliant and have no easy way of becoming license compliant.

That's nonsense.

Using SVN has nothing to do with SVN being under GPL2, GPL3, AGPL, Apache or any other license that allows for free use, as long as you don't modify SVN and distribute (or provision over the network, in case of AGPL) the modified version. Using SVN to hosting your code repository is in no way modifying and distributing it.

Unless you are modifying the code the section 13 of the AGPL does not require you to distribute source at all so most distribution users would never notice the difference. I guess this might effect you if you had some crazy internal fork of BerkeleyDB that you were regularly merging upstream into but that doesn't seem like a huge use-case for this software somehow.

Subversion is Apache licensed, so I fail to see how this would be a problem.

Subversion uses bdb as its backend.

And the Apache licensed Subversion is still compatible with AGPL licensed BDB. What am I missing here?

Apparently the Apache License is not compatible with AGPLv3. I confess I do not understand why.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/07/msg00041.html

I thought the BDB backend for Subversion had been deprecated for years...

As TFA says, the problem is the anti-tivoization clause, which creates issues for web developers, issues which weren't there with the previous licenses and that should push more people to buy commercial licenses as insurance.

No, the article does not mention the anti-tivoization clause. The AGPL requires you to share the source code with users, even when the software is hosted on your machines. That's what differentiates AGPL from GPLv3.

Apologies, I thought that was exactly the anti-tivo provision of gpl3/agpl ? Not that I've looked too hard, it's really not my field.

It's a slight bummer but not really a big problem. If the community doesn't like the license it'll just fork and we'll end up with a similar situation to MySQL and MariaDB.

i.e. we're better off in the end. Open source lives because of it's contributors and can not be killed off by a corporation.

EDIT: Removed my 'opinion' because it's not important :-)

So the problem, if I understand it correctly, is that you want to create a commercial product out of free building blocks, and you're angry that the author of one of those building blocks in changing their license so that you can't use it any more and still sell your product?