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When AGPLv3 is not enough

In the perfect world all software would be free in the same way as everything you buy in the grocery has mandatory "Nutrition facts label".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_facts_label

In our imperfect world, the best thing we have is GNU Affero General Public License, which is the most powerful tool to ensure that nobody software stays free.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

For long time it was absurd for me to question choice of the license. Of course you want the maximum protectection. We couple historical examples where GPL licence family resulted in otherwise would-be-proprietary software to be released as free. And there were several court cases won over GPL infringement recently. Isn't it great?

But other day, I thought carefully about practical benefits, and I am not so sure anymore.

There are plenty of major free software projects -- Postgres, sqlite3, curl, GHC, lua -- released under permissive or public-domain licenses, yet I don't observe proprietary forks going rampant. Instead, companies are eager to contribute under whatever license necessary to avoid burden of maintaining the fork in-house.

Since licenses of GPL family -- GPL-2, GPL-3, AGPL-3 -- are incompatible with each other, they add friction to the code sharing. I did spend some time of my life sending emails to past contributors and asking them to re-license their code. Ideally, Free Software community would settle on one of license of the family, but xkcd#927 happened instead.

Furthermore, GPL family license is not even necessary a declaration of loyalty to the ideals of Free Software. Recently, together with CLA, it was used to power "Open Core" model. What "Open Core" means is that instead of potentially multiple competing proprietary forks, we end up with single powerful proprietary fork by the original developer, and GPL happen to empower that developer further by inhibiting the competition. Not good.

https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

Recently I even encountered a project on GitHub which claimed to be open-source, but somewhere in dependencies there was effectively proprietary library by the same authors, released in form of obfuscated code uploaded to "npmjs.com". And all this while waiving the flag of AGPLv3.

I don't have the conviction to make a point yet, I am just sharing my doubts whether in the world defiled by web applications AGPLv3 provides any practical benefits over releasing into the public domain.