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   Bahman Movaqar (bahmanm@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:09:10 JST Bahman Movaqar

   in reply to

   • Nicolas Martyanoff

   @galdor OK, I think it's about 2 separate phases:

   1. The product is niche & user base small: your approach is def'ly friendlier and easier to work w/.

   2. The product has got a large userbase (like ELK, Terraform, ...): the main challenge are not competitors but rather redistributors like Amazon who make easy $$$ out of your hard work. In that case IMHO AGPL v3 is the fairest and safest of them all.

   • Embed this notice
     Nicolas Martyanoff (galdor@emacs.ch)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:09:10 JST Nicolas Martyanoff

     in reply to

     @bahmanm AGPLv3 does not stop Amazon from using your products, it stops them from hiding their modifications.

     But no one care about Amazon modifications in that case. AWS users will use the Amazon version because it's all magically integrated.

     This is why Elastic and other companies have a clause stating that you cannot sell access to an hosted version of the service.

     If you instead keep enterprise-oriented extensions proprietary, Amazon now has to actually develop and maintain them, this is a bit harder.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Nicolas Martyanoff (galdor@emacs.ch)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:09:12 JST Nicolas Martyanoff

     in reply to

     @bahmanm In my opinion, using AGPLv3 is very good at making sure no company is going to touch your software.

     If this is what you want, great. But if you want professional developers using your software hoping that it will lead to companies paying for support/features, you need a license which is not an instant mood killer.

   • Embed this notice
     Bahman Movaqar (bahmanm@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:09:13 JST Bahman Movaqar

     in reply to

     • Nicolas Martyanoff

     @galdor And let's not forget switching to #AGPL v3 will not only ensure a #copyleft license for the community but will also forces the competitors/distributors (read #Amazon) do the same.

   • Embed this notice
     Nicolas Martyanoff (galdor@emacs.ch)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Aug-2023 23:09:14 JST Nicolas Martyanoff

     The old "we don't want competitors to undercut us" thing is such a bad justification for switching to non Open Source licenses (e.g. Elastic, Hashicorp…). You can absolutely keep some features in proprietary extensions and make them available to enterprise clients while keeping the main software OSS.

     Cluster mode, SSO, SCIM, audit logs, account impersonation, integrations with proprietary software, the list goes on and on. And these features are usually hard to replicate, good for you.