From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>
Hi all,
As you know, I’ve been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I’ve been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I’d welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.
Have a lovely day! Alex
I thought AGPL was the more restrictive version of GPL? Which license should we use so that corporates need to pay?
AGPL is the most restrictive OSI approved license (of the commonly used ones), but it is still a free (libre) open source license. My understanding is just that the AGPL believes in the end-users rights to access to the open source needs to be maintained and therefore places some burden to make the source available if it it’s being run on a server.
In general, companies run away from anything AGPL, however, some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.
As far as documentation goes, you could license documentation under AGPL, and people could still charge for it. It would just need to be kept available for end-users which i don’t think is really a barrier to use for documentation.
some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.
What is wrong with charging for your services?
Open source licences aren’t meant to make it impossible to earn money or anything. As long as companies comply with the licences I don’t see anything wrong with it.
If a licence wants to make it impossible to earn money they should put that in the actual licence.
Nothing. The context of this comment thread is “fuck corporations” and then proposing AGPL to solve that. I am merely pointing out that if their goal is to have a non-commercial license then AGPL doesn’t solve that, which is why i mention they can charge for their services with AGPL.
It is my understanding that the only difference applies to hosted software. For example, Lemmy is AGPL. If it were GPL, then a company could take the source code, modify it and host their own version without open sourcing their modifications. AGPL extends to freedoms of GPL to users of hosted software as well.
A real example of this would be truth social which is modified Mastodon and as AGPL those modifications are required to be open source as well.
Unfortunately it is still not enough. There have been many instances of people using these licenses and still corporations using their software without giving back, and developers being upset about it.
And unfortunately there are no popular licenses that limit that. I’ve seen a few here and there, but doesn’t seem to be a standard.
