> A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing,
I'm sorry but this is just nonsense. LAMP is called that because it was a very standardized thing. Pop in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it. There were even ready made installers for Windows and Mac if you weren't on an Internet native operating system.
A lot more people got by using custom bash scripts, but cfengine exited in the 90s. It's still not honest to say things were more manual. Take a look at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today and look at the Compose or self hosted K8s stacks people set up today. That's orders of magnitude more manual work than just popping in a CD and selecting LAMP.
Yes, those are not the same thing. Yes, a self hosted stack today consists of so much more than running PHP in a web server. But for self hosters, the amount of work required has objectively gone through the roof. That's a problem if your goal is data sovereignty.
> op in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it.
At the time in question here tasksel wasn't a thing, I think merely a concept. It made its way in Debian installer around 20005 IIRC, right along "one-click installs" from hosting services mentioned in the other reply. The whole decade before that, indeed manual set up was needed.
> at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today [...] That's orders of magnitude more manual work
There is two kinds of self-hosters, those who aim at reproducibility and those who don't. The latter is more fun, the former gets quickly mandatory when you _rely_ on your homelab.
> it makes me happy if people can make a business using a bit of my work
It's an idea as old as any:
The freedom to restrict the freedom of others, is it really a freedom?
It is a tiresome debate. People can argue about it until the sun sets without reaching an agreement. Better to be clear about which kind of freedom you mean, and respect the choice of others.
Plenty of businesses have been started around free software without necessarily restricting the freedoms of others. It is often argued that this constitutes a better approximation of a truly free market than the entry barriers intellectual property law can put up.
Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
Why does it have to be forced? Why can't murder just be legal and if you want to murder that's fine and if you don't, that's fine too...
It was not forced charity from the original author. They were free to choose any license. The original author is the only one in the position to choose to be charitable or not. No one else's opinion on charity matters.
Rather being thoughtful and principled enough to choose a copyleft license is the truest charity of all and the most valuable for all other consumers forever after.
It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
If I get something from you and the only terms are not money but simply attribute and share-alike, that is not some burden.
That's like saying the only terms are you can have this for free and you can use it for any purpose you want, but just promise not to punch me in the face. "What? Outrageous! It's totally unreasonable to make it a condition enforced by law that I can't punch you in the face and still take your stuff."
>Philosophically I see it as forced don't-murder is no longer true don't-murder.
I would suggest reading "A Clockwork Orange", as it highlights why compulsory ethics is no longer just without free will. Spoiler, even if people lobotomize a murderer to have their behavior meet an arbitrary definition of societal good it is just as unethical.
>It's forced on everyone else after that, but I see no problem with that because remind me again just what exactly is the terrible burden being forced again?
Adding what is effectively an end user copyright DRM submarine under the flag of FOSS is tantamount to sabotage.
I do not see the distinction between copyright and copyleft trolls. They both demand end users give up freedoms to meet a selfish ideal.
If someone wants to control how people use their stuff, than just stop calling it a FOSS work. Some seem very passionate about the subject, but I don't think anyone has ever been murdered over shitty code. =3
I'm sorry - what I meant to say is that it is listed in the SPDX (https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html) as a recognized license. The revenue gate means it will never be considered an open-source license by the OSI.
Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.
It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.
It doesn’t have to be binary. A license like this allows for 99% of the personal and commercial use that a project will ever see, while giving the author leverage over large corporations - which is the main gripe people have. It is not ideal for libraries or things that would be redistributed, but then you have other options.
Some things in life are binary. You either allow people to build new products and businesses on your work or you don't. Would you allow me to extend the product with new features? "It depends" is a form of "no". It is not a position to sustainably work from.
If you frame the licensing space as for either personal or commercial use, perhaps your point of view makes sense, but this is not a useful framing for most people, and it is specifically not something the open source community cares about.
If you wish to keep leverage over others then you do not wish to have them compete with you on the same product. That is a valid position to have, but it is squarely on the non-free part of the licensing spectrum. You don't want to play within the open source community and they don't want to play with you. All anyone owe others is to make that clear.
This is why open source is rapidly becoming obsolete ;) There have been source-available/fair source/whatever-you-name-it approaches before.
They were attacked by OSI zealots every time because it's not real open source. Which is true, but the unsaid - or well, only sometimes mentioned - other half is that these open source enthusiasts would you rather have a bog standard all-rights-reserved commercial licence than a relatively open licence without the four freedoms!
I can't claim to read other people's thoughts, but my hunch is that this happens because it's too "close" to an open source licence so they view it as competition, while they view commercial software as either a straightforward enemy or they don't care about it whatsoever.
The history aside, this approach just makes the open source community more and more irrelevant each day, especially with the advent of "vibecode your own dependencies up". The 4 freedoms come from a place where they were about users, but gigantic corporations have shoehorned themselves into being users, and instead of the community defending against it, they think the freedom to exploit the maintainers' work while contributing nothing back is more important than keeping the commons free and shared. :P
The freedom to host open-source software is more important than contributing back to the original project: it's where the actual value of open source comes from. Would you host your website behind Apache or Nginx if you couldn't just switch providers and keep the same web server? Would you ever pick up Postgres or MySQL if you couldn't actually pay a company to host that for you, knowing that if they screwed up, you could switch to a provider that did it better?
From a pure engineering reliability perspective, coupling your technology choice to your vendor gives that vendor too much leverage (as we've seen with, for example, VMware).
This isn't about defending the big companies at all. It's about defending the right of hosting providers to compete on hosting a variety of software. In the alternative world of entirely commercial licenses, or entirely BUSL-styled licenses, you would be shackled to the specific vendors that happened to create the technology that you wanted to leverage. This is a scenario where the customer invariably loses.
Let's not get everything mixed up here - I singled out BUSL exactly because it does not prevent competing services, especially at small scale. In fact it would encourage small business and individual usage vs big cloud providers. It also has a conversion clause, so worst case scenario you have a slightly outdated MIT-licensed release to pick up from.
The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
That said, indeed it might not be an ideal choice for that kind of cloud-hosted software if you want to maximize adoption.
> The EUPL the author mentions, the AGPL and others are the ones that directly prevent competing services.
To support sibling comment: no it doesn't?
But your point about the revenue cut off in the BUSL is worthwhile (assuming we're talking about a licensor that is leveraging the additional use grant). I just disagree that it's a remedy because it basically punishes a business for being successful, by changing the rules upon which it was built. I'd be very curious to hear of anybody who has licensed software under the BUSL and has ended up getting a license from companies that meet those revenue thresholds.
It's worth noting that the BUSL, by default, with no additional use grant, prohibits the use of the software in production. So I actually think you have the two licenses reversed. The BUSL prohibits production use and competing services by default unless an additional use grant is specified and then it is only allowed under the revenue threshold specified in the additional use grant.
The AGPL has no prohibition whatsoever on the deployment of competing services.
It is expected that you use the license with an Additional Use Grant. For example, Hashicorp says:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.
Or, for a revenue threshold:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.
That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.
The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].
That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.
I think we're agreeing, but you seem to be spinning things:
1. BUSL does not allow production use. Additional Use Grant (optional) is necessary to allow this, and is typcially accompanied by a revenue limit, setting a trap for any business that attempts to use it by changing the rules as they become more successful.
2. The AGPL does allow production use, by default, forever, but requires you publish associated source code when providing the service.
Only one of these licenses bans production use, and that's the BUSL. It can be modified to allow it under certain circumstances, but your original statement, that BUSL allows production use and AGPL prohibits it, is exactly reversed.
At its core it's a question of control. If I use this library or app, will I be safe? Will I be able to repair it, use it in the future, pay someone to fix it? Will it still be developed in a few years?
FOSS is a great answer to the first few questions, but it fails at the last one. As a user, yes, I would prefer a cloud-protection license, if it means that software will still be developed in a few years time. It's not like I want to use this software to compete with the author, I'm happy not to be allowed to do that.
Well, there's no guarantee that there will be sufficient market in a few years for that software development to continue unless you fork it and do so (or pay to have done) yourself.
Yes, you would be allowed to extend the product. There is no 'it depends', the license is quite short and clear. You have to acquire a commercial license once you go over the revenue threshold, that is all.
I find this much simpler to understand than AGPL/LGPL or the linked EUPL.
Things such as WASM and WebGL should really be click-to-play, just like media files are.
I am decidedly uninterested in those features for most web pages I visit. Should they be able to spin up my CPU fan just for that I would consider it a misfeature. Just like a movie on high volume would be.
If anyone familiar with Firefox could implement that or point in the right direction, that would be most welcome.
Similarities between extremely conservative Christianism and extremely conservative Islamism? I am shocked!
Seriously, has anyone ever argued that evangelicals and islamists would disagree about conservative ideas such as the role of sexuality or feminism in society? That sounds like a straw man among straw men.
Would you mind spelling them out? Because all I find hovers between old fashioned reactionism and bat shit craziness. What is the philosophical value in that?
Parent poster probably should have mentioned Ellul, who the unabomber was heavily influenced by. Makes it easier for people who simply pattern match based on culturally enforced taboos instead of reading the source material and drawing their own conclusions.
To begin, I'm most interested in his argument that technology can become autonomous to the point that human beings can no longer control it and will become reliant on it, undermining human agency. AI will accelerate this issue and will be used by elites to subjugate lower classes.
From the Wikipedia page for Industrial Society and Its Future:
> [He argues] that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology. Furthermore it states that forcing humans to adapt to machinery creates a sociopolitical order that suppresses human potential and freedom. [...] The manifesto states that the public largely accepts individual technological advancements as purely positive without accounting for their overall effect, including the erosion of local and individual freedom and autonomy.
This leads to some interesting questions. Do human beings still have autonomy if we allow our decisionmaking to be offloaded to machines? Is technological progress for the sake of progress a good thing? Does it serve humanity? If it does serve humanity, who does it serve and at what cost? What does our society become when human beings no longer have purpose?
It's hard to take this seriously when the entire kernel is GPL.
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