You receive permission to use and modify a piece of software under conditions set by the creator. It is a license, not a gift. If you don’t like the conditions, use something else or create your own thing.

I will never understand these complaints. Not only do you want stuff for free, you also want to impose your preferred usage conditions on the creator. Where does this entitlement come from?

You’re confused. The author chooses to gift their software to the world when they choose a free software license.

Presumably people who choose the AGPL choose it because they believe it is a free software license. Either they should use an actual coherent free software license instead of one that is trying (and probably failing) to also be a EULA, or they should stop pretending that they are releasing free software.

> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.

It does not prohibit modifications - it just demands that those who exercise the freedoms share their modifications under the same license, and most businesses balk at that.

> The anti-commerce bent of a subset of the free software zealots hate business so much...

The root of the problem is actually the anti-free-software bent that business zealots have, because they want to be able take code for free and make money off of it without giving any of their changes back under the same terms; open-source contributors are not suckers to be exploited. Things would be so much better if the moochers weren't trying to capture all of the value downstream of other people's work, but just some or even most of it.

GPL and AGPL don't even prohibit for-profit businesses from using software with those licenses, they just say you don't get to pretend it's your own intellectual property and privatize it.

It's not anti-commerce or anti-business to contractually prohibit selfish entities from absconding with public goods for private gain and refusing to contribute any public good back in the process.

Similar idea to public roads - if you want to use public roads that the rest of us enjoy, pay taxes like the rest of us do. Using public roads without paying taxes doesn't make you a savvy businessman, it makes you an amoral freeloader.

If you want an intellectual property moat, fund the labor to build it yourself. The world doesn't owe you a penny.

I'm not sure what you are complaining about, AGPL is doing nothing against commerce and you are free to fork and sell a service using that fork. Just make sure to provide the code source of your fork to your user so they can also make their own forks, potentially making their own commercial services with them. It might be to most pro commerce licence I know.

Nobody is prohibiting you from using modified AGPL software to run your business.

Something missing is you can absolutely host your own private instance.

The trigger happens when someone interacts with your code over a network, such as in the context of a SaaS product.

The line is when you try to profit off of someone else's work that it becomes "not free".

Also, not free simply means it needs to be in public.

This is so that any additive features that you construct can be taken back by the original maintainers. Thus, you have no competitive advantage.

If you wanted to, through marketing or similar, compete with them, you are more than welcome, but it would be with feature parity.

I'm not so sure this very fair compromise warrants your rhetoric.

Please don't take this as a personal dig because it's not meant that way, but this has such berating a girl for not being into you energy. You want something from them, and they just want you to go away, basically. You offer nothing they want, you want what they have.

Nah I mostly don’t use AGPL software because I consider it nonfree, the same way I don’t use any other source-available nonfree stuff.

The issue I have with it is the hypocrisy, not the code. They pretend that it’s free software but it’s just an anti-commercial use restriction EULA.

Anyway, most AGPL stuff is a 48 hour Claude rewrite away from having a free clone these days anyway. (In fact I have done just that several times recently, without even cloning/downloading the AGPL “upstream” repo, just with a vague mental model of what the db schema might be.)

AGPL gives you the same FSF freedoms as GPL or as any other free license, but it does come with an additional responsibility to the end users, not from the end users. AGPL is not in any way uniquely qualifiable as "a EULA". Every single software license, of course, requires you to agree to the license, hence the name. If you put nothing private in the code, AGPL will not impact your privacy. If anything, AGPL helps assure end users that their privacy is being respected.

> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business

I don't think it does that, it prohibits them from modifying it and then using that mod to fork users away from the original software, aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.

Then it's good that it allows both modification and using it to run a business?

> This “users are obligated ‘give back’ the moment they make money with the gift they were given” is nonsense

But they are under no such obligation! They can make all the money they want and give nothing back. They can even modify the software to better serve their business. The only restriction is that if they do so, they have to make their modifications available. Which means they're way ahead of where they were before being given the initial software; why do you feel a software developer who decides to give the world a gift should be restricted in what gift they're giving? "Thanks for the chocolate, but the bar was too small so I didn't have enough left over for my kid to try some. Why do you hate my kid?"

> A business making money using free software doesn’t take anything away from the releasing organization.

First, that is false. They could damage the market for the original software. (And if they don't modify the software, then there's no problem in the first place.)

Second, why are you so hung up on the "making money" part, when that is explicitly allowed by the AGPL? It's just kind of bizarre -- it's a license that says over and over that you can charge for everything related to it, and you're complaining about it being hostile to people who want to charge money for things.

Thinking about it, I'm wondering if this is genuine confusion and you don't know what the AGPL is? If so, maybe start by searching for "charge" in https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html . It has nothing against "using it to run [a] business". There is no "moment they make money with the gift" that changes anything: you are explicitly allowed to charge for anything you like -- distribution, usage of the service, support, whatever.