I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
Here’s a fun idea, let’s fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)
You could do that. MIT is a very free license.
Of course, that would only be a useful thing to do if you were also going to contribute to the code.
True, but the mere existence of an AGPL project that follows the MIT one might be enough to convince would-be contributors to choose our version instead.
It may also be more likely to be adopted by non-corporate Linux distros that favour the AGPL over MIT (Debian for example) which in turn could help make the AGPL version the dominant one.
Note that AGPL can take changes from MIT but MIT can’t take changes that are purely AGPL without following the AGPL.
So, as far as I can understand, any improvements done to the AGPL version cannot be carried over to the MIT version (without very painful and careful re-implementation / re-engineering). That alone would be a big advantage to the hypothetical AGPL fork.
It would be a bit of a legal nightmare, since it’s theoretically possible that, even without really knowing it, the same feature might be implemented the same way in both forks separately, and the MIT devs might have no sure way to prove they did not copy it. So this would be like walking on eggshells for them.
Thats the point of GPl licenses. You cant close source it.
MIT is a free and also heavy closed source friendly. GPL fixes the greed
Yes. Did I deny that?
Can anyone confirm or deny if what I said is wrong?
I get downvoted for stating one advantage an AGPL fork would have, and yet nobody seems to be disagreeing with what I said… *shrugs* 🤷
If I could code at the level that these people do, I definitely would. If I ever publish anything that I’ve written for myself it will never be MIT/BSD licensed