> The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

As a counterpoint, when I make something open source, I really mean "freedom", which includes the freedom to build a commercial service using the software. I use the MIT license not because of "corporate interests to undermine free software ideals", but because I really want the software to be free as in freedom.

GPL, GPLv3, AGPL and similar license actually restrict the freedom to do anything you want with the software. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that "free software ideals" could mean different things to different people, and there might not be any "corporate interests".

Amazon offers lots of AGPL software, and they fully respect the license in all cases. Ultimately the GPL is about protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights. So as long as AWS can offer a better/cheaper managed version of a software service, while still giving the users all details on how to run the same service if they chose to, then the AGPL is completely achieving its aims, even if the original company goes out of business.

As I recall, Open Source was about developers collaborating to make better software. It was a pro-developer philosophy vs the Free Software movement which was all about the rights of users (and developer hostile in my view). GPL and its children are from the Free Software Tradition.

Open Source provides the same “4 freedoms” as Free Software so most Open Source licenses qualify as Free Software as well.

If the goal is developer collaboration, permissive licenses are often the best choice. If you want maximum user entitlement, copyleft licenses limit developer freedom in exchange for a guarantee that future code will also be released as free software.

Cloud hosting was a challenge that did not exist when either philosophy first emerged.

With hosting, you are able to become the preferred source for software without adding much value to the code itself. This is what the author is complaining about.

The AGPL tries to address this in the GPL family but I don’t think it quite gets there. For permissive licenses, we see these “no hosting” exceptions.

If you read the early writings from the Free Software Foundation, they do not care if devs can make a living. The goal is user freedom. I think it is this philosophy that objects to the hosting exceptions.

Perhaps a better solution will be found in the future.

> The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

Not wanting to further widen the schism but wasn't that the free software people rather than the open source people? cf [0], particularly the "not as strict" part.

> In the late 1990's Eric Raymond and others developed the term "open source" as a more business friendly term than "free software", with a more inclusive meaning where licenses that were not as strict about the passing on of modifications would also quality for the term.

[0] https://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Eric_...

>The original stance of the open source crowd.....

>The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses...

Interesting how the world have changed. The so called GPL preference, or GPL > GPLv3 > AGPL among Open source crowd is a recent thing. Arguably in the last 15 to 20 years. Both BSD and MIT dates back before GPL. And you will see far more people prefer BSD and MIT in the 90s and 00s.

I have also long argued that the license preference among generation has somewhat a linkage to political shift in spectrum. Likely to do with Tech, now known as Big tech taking advantage. And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

> The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

Is it not because corporations started funding open source projects in a big way (multiple billions of dollars a year big), and they fund projects that have licenses that they can use in their commercial projects.

To me that's a sign of the success of Open Source rather than the opposite.

> The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

Expanding on this, the Free Software movement always focused on freedom for users - which, in a world where copyright applies to computer programs, ultimately leads to the licenses you listed to repurpose it.

The Open Source movement usually tries to advocate for open-source as the best development model. As in, writing it in the open and contributing with other people will result in objectively better software in the long term. Others treated it (when the term was coined) as a marketing term for Free Software, making it more palatable to businesses whose people running it don't want to talk about ethics too much.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

The original stance of open source is to cater to "free-riding" businesses. That's like, why the term "open source" even exists. You're thinking of the "free software" crowd.

> The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

s/open source/free software/

None of those licenses prevent Amazon-style freeloading though.

The MIT and BSD licenses predated the GPL. People have a choice as to which ethic to follow ... it's not the result of a corporate conspiracy. (And I'm a social democrat, not a corporate simp.)