I share your sentiment and would love to expand how I feel as if even AGPL isn't enough for cloud providers like Amazon, Google etc. which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party
Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...
It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.
> which can just technically run it on their servers without too much modifications or release the modifications and still compete against the original AGPL party
Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)
Big companies will rather ignore your project than use an AGPL licensed product. For them it's just not worth the hassle.
Maybe 1 out a 1 billion software is so revolutionary that licenses be damned. But maybe we should temper our expectations a bit around the software we build!
Interesting, I might write my software under AGPL but still I guess some questions arise as if sure the big companies might not use my project but some smaller companies can still create an competing product.
As an example immich is an AGPL based software which has its own instance and then https://pixelunion.eu (I think gives more free stuff like 16 gig instance etc) and then competes with immich itself
They can do this because they release any changes they make or they don't change it that much .
> Sounds like you want "monopoly as a license" :)
What I want is if someone uses my open source product and then uses it to create an competing product, I am under no obligation to release it under a foss and much rather then release it under an source available license
The type of audience Immich targets, pretty fundamentally limits the appeal of any hosted solution, unlike a lot of the infrastructure-type of project a lot of these "big cloud taking my code" complaints come from.
SSPL doesn't help with the real problem that SSPL/etc companies complain about though; that AWS won't give you money when they turn your software into a service and will compete with you to reduce your income.
Of course, the license is kind of irrelevant to that situation, Amazon will just reimplement your stuff from scratch if it is popular enough.
Okay? You might as well not make it easy for them by letting them copy your software verbatim? What's this argument that since life isn't fair you might as well just give up and help the evil people? People following this argument are one reason evil people are so powerful.
Personally I get worried that even AGPL might not be enough for me if I create a service which faces the public because if it gets large enough then companies technically can still call dibs on me and use their infrastructure to compete against me and I could do nothing...
It was an interesting thought experiment and made me blur the lines between (Fully open source good, source available bad) to well... it depends. And I think everyone should have such nuance since I don't think we live in a world of black and white but its interesting to hear everyone's opinion on it as this topic gets raised every once in a while.