> OTOH, if you don't want anyone to use your software and if you want to stay poor, use a radioactive license like AGPL
Lol, business HN look on the AGPL is truly funny,
Because its made to stop people from using the code without contributing, which is exactly what you want to do.
Also the biggest on-prem cloud system Nextcloud is under the AGPL, which has its own commercial company Nextcloud GmbH.
I am always amused when people complain about the restriction not to be a d**k.
Every time you see someone call something like AGPL something like radioactive, you just saw someone out themselves as a theif.
Copyleft: "You can have this for free. You can use it for personal use, you can use it for making mony, you can even redistribute it, you can even sell copies of it itself! The only things you can't do are deny access to that which you were given for free from the next guy, or scrub the existing credits to pretend you wrote it."
What you wrote matches the MIT license, not the AGPL, say.
With AGPL, users have to immediately give away derivative works, and there are many business circumstances when that won't do. Hence dual licensing by the vendor - but alas dual licensing sets up the possibility of bait and switch, or can.
Those are the terms. If you can't tolerate having to re-share that which you were given, then great news, you don't have to. You can write your own software or buy software that has some other license.
Derivative works are just a form of giving the next guy that which you were given. It's not stealing anything from you even though the derivative is more than the origi al. It's only "radioactive" if what you wish to do is take and enjoy and profit from without paying back or forward in the same manner which you benefitted from, which implies more than merely the MIT style original still existing out there somewhere.
It's only radioactive to someone who wants to steal. It's incompatible or unusable in a purely traditional commercial business model, but that isn't "radioactive" any more than a commercial library is "radioactive" if you don't want to pay it's fee. It just means the terms aren't a fit for what you want to do, but they are not in any way bad or unreasonable terms.
Those are not the terms of the AGPL, etc - the terms you actually cited fit MIT, instead.
In any case, you're happy about leaving most businesses out - but that limits how much open source there is out there, and the quality. It forces, again and again, billions of dollars and scarce programming resources to be spent recreating software under one license to be replicated under, say, MIT. Witness the Android libraries replacing GNU libraries, Chromium replacing Webkit, and on and on and on. Absurdly wasteful, and in the end you get at least as much freeloading, which is the theft you're worrying about. That's what you're being happy about.
Copyleft is a genius idea, a wonderful idea (without the patent grab) but it can't fit all cases. A law that restricted code copyrights to four years (and forced code to be revealed or put into escrow) would perhaps be a better solution.
> Those are not the terms of the AGPL, etc - the terms you actually cited fit MIT, instead.
No they dont.
MIT doesn't make sure that derived works are still FOSS, which is why it's one of the most favorite licenses for companies.
> In any case, you're happy about leaving most businesses out - but that limits how much open source there is out there, and the quality. It forces, again and again, billions of dollars and scarce programming resources to be spent recreating software under one license to be replicated under, say, MIT. Witness the Android libraries replacing GNU libraries, Chromium replacing Webkit, and on and on and on. Absurdly wasteful, and in the end you get at least as much freeloading, which is the theft you're worrying about. That's what you're being happy about.
Yes, that's great.
Its Googles problem that they wanted to create a closed source version from Android.
No body forced them to do that.
They 'wasted' billion of dollars just to avoid giving back.
You might say the Android is still open source so google has given back.
Partially, because full android has many features and many DRM services that aren't included in AOSP.
What you said earlier doesn't imply anything about derived works; just that the original goes on: "The only things you can't do are deny access to that which you were given for free from the next guy, or scrub the existing credits to pretend you wrote it." Now you're saying you can't keep private what you added, which is a change.
Google paid billions for the duplicated Nix library and then gave it away under a more permissive license. (That can't be said of all of Android, we agree, but I didn't mention all of Android.) You can't give everything to competitors all the time in business, in every circumstance.
Lol, business HN look on the AGPL is truly funny, Because its made to stop people from using the code without contributing, which is exactly what you want to do.
Also the biggest on-prem cloud system Nextcloud is under the AGPL, which has its own commercial company Nextcloud GmbH.
https://github.com/nextcloud/server