Unlicensing

    Unlicensing

    I initially chose the AGPL license for Fossable's SaaS projects because I wanted to make sure that no one could run their own derivative services without also making them free and open source. AGPL is about the strongest copyleft license you can get; even running a server requires its source code to be made available to users.

    That all sounds great to me, but a dozen paragraphs of legalese in a LICENSE.txt file won't actually stop someone from doing whatever they want with your code. Chances are, they won't even think to check for a license.

    Surely there must be reprecussions of breaking the license?

    If you had the will and money to levy a legal battle against even the most guilty perpetrator (who's probably somewhere like Russia), then maybe there's a microscopic chance of winning. However, my personal mission is to never be involved with a laywer in any capacity, so I wouldn't go down that route, no matter how blatant and grevious the license infraction.

    By the way, Fossable isn't even a legal entity of any kind; how can it hold copyright on software and license it out under AGPL? Even if I had infinite funds to go after a license infringer, the case would have no ground from the start.

    Are open source licenses overrated?

    The software industry is filled with things that everyone thinks you need.

    • Got 100 users? Well, you better get some Kubernetes in there to scale up to 1,000,000.

    • Need to plan a project? Better have Jira with Kanban boards, story points, and burndown charts.

    • Writing something in plain old Javascript? Wrong, you have to use TypeScript.

    I'm starting to think open source software licenses are something like that. For open source run by big tech, licenses probably make a lot of sense. They've got the lawyers to back those licenses up and sue your ass out of existence if you fuck with them.

    As someone that's mainly interested in the joy of building software, I don't want any part of that drama, even if I were to be on the "winning" side. It's not worth it to me. That's why Fossable isn't a non-profit corporation or even any kind of legal organization at all. I'm not interested in the copyright disputes, trademarks, payroll, taxes, etc.

    So, this is the line of thinking that led me to this decision: all current and future Fossable projects will use the unlicense going forward.