alt Hacker News> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.
They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.
The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers, etc.
Replies
I know this is true of AGPL, but GPL3? I thought the people who objected to GPL3 were those distributing software to their users (e.g. was a reason Apple switched from bash to zsh). I cannot think of aything in GPL3 that would be a problem for hyper-scalers.
> They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.
Laws are only as good as their enforcement, in business at least. Unfortunately I have seen first hand that no one cares about licensing if they can’t get caught.
Businesses licenses are good because you can offer support and other benefits to encourage payment.
Or SSPL, which extends AGPL with even more sharing requirements.
The GPL3 can be put behind a server and no one will ever see the source code because there is never any distribution.
Only the AGPL is remotely close to forcing hyper-scalars to release the source code of what they provide.