Thanks for providing your point of view, appreciate it!
So the point of AGPL is to force people into a world of open source? Not because it's better and people prefer it, but because the license requires it? I'm not sure I'm a fan of that, as that's the opposite of what I see freedom being.
"nearly complete freedom" and "they simply must" feels like it's missing the point. As someone else in this post said: "freedom is just freedom". By defining what conditions freedom vs not-freedom is ok, aren't we missing the entire point of freedom?
If you give people freedom, they might use that in a way you don't approve of. If you give freedom, unless you do X, it's not freedom anymore, it's just a set of constraints.
It's not to force open source, but to ensure that free software stays free.
Freedom is good, right? The GPL is based on the belief that everlasting nearly-total freedom is better than transient total freedom.
Restrict exactly one freedom now, the ability to release without source, and you guarantee all the remaining freedoms (all of them!) to all future end users.
Allow that one last freedom to developers, and you potentially deprive freedom from later users.
The GPL doesn't stop people from using software in ways I don't approve. It only prevents further restrictions on freedom.
> I'm not sure I'm a fan of that, as that's the opposite of what I see freedom being.
Your freedom ends where other people's freedom begins. That's just basic ethics. No freedom is absolute.
And by releasing important software under Free/Libre licenses, one enables a lot of other people's freedoms that way.
Whereas the distinction of freedom you're looking for is egoistic and self-serving. Which is okay, I guess, for code that you wrote all by yourself, but not for projects where other people participate as well.
So the point of AGPL is to force people into a world of open source? Not because it's better and people prefer it, but because the license requires it? I'm not sure I'm a fan of that, as that's the opposite of what I see freedom being.
"nearly complete freedom" and "they simply must" feels like it's missing the point. As someone else in this post said: "freedom is just freedom". By defining what conditions freedom vs not-freedom is ok, aren't we missing the entire point of freedom?
If you give people freedom, they might use that in a way you don't approve of. If you give freedom, unless you do X, it's not freedom anymore, it's just a set of constraints.