With current shortages, PLEASE include "pre-order" rather than just "out-of-stock." There are a lot of items where I don't mind waiting, but I WILL forget. Here, the sealed watch is available, but the dev kit comes in September.
Why do I need to set a calendar reminder for September and then (perhaps) place an order? Can't I just pay now, and you'll deliver when it's ready (or refund if it's never ready)?
That's double true for things like graphics cards and other extreme shortages.
Aside from making it easier on me, YOU can plan demand. YOU can place appropriate manufacturing orders. If you have 1000 preorders, you can order 1200 devices. Otherwise, you'll be ordering 200, and find yourself out-of-stock again (or with a glut).
Preorders generate risk for a business, because you take money and owe a customer goods, potentially for months. You cannot spend that money because you need to be able to refund it, but you're also carrying the risk of storing and protecting that money because it's technically yours.
If the date, costs and shipping of the next batch aren't even known yet, it makes no sense to open up for preorders. Also, the company risks taking on more preorders than stock they can get their hands on, which will only help to disappoint customers who will have to wait more weeks for the next batch to arrive. There's a lot that can go wrong for the company.
If it took more than a few days to sell out for each batch, it might make sense because it'd allow for the store to be sure that their entire volume is moved. From what I've seen, these watches go out of stock in hours. There's no need for the store to carry risks to make ordering extra convenient for its customers because they will sell out regardless.
There's benefits for batching orders before you back order from the factory, but there's also downsides. From a business standpoint, I don't see the advantage of taking on back orders for a product that sells out instantly anyway.
If you're anxious to by the Pinetime, the hardware is practically the same as the Colmi P8 if I recall correctly, and the open source OS can be flashed on that with some extra steps you can find online. You can find that watch, and many similar ones, on your favourite Chinese import website. You lose the official support, but you'd get your hands on a hackable watch without setting a calender reminder.
I think a lot of that can be managed with messaging and expectation-setting.
My experience hasn't been that volume is manufacturing-limited. A frobitz costs $50 to make, ship, support, etc:
- I know I'll sell 200
- I think I might sell 800
- Best-case, I'll sell 1600
Without preorders, if I order 200 and sell for $60, I'll come out $2000 ahead guaranteed. If I order 800, I might come out $8000 ahead, or I might come out $28k behind. If I order 1600, I'll be almost guaranteed to come out behind.
Ergo, it makes more sense for me to order as many as I *know* I'll sell, and to have shortages than it does to order extra. Unsold units cost a lot, and can drive me bankrupt. Shortages are a bit of lost profit. That's especially true for low-volume, as is the case here.
> Preorders generate risk for a business, because you take money and owe a customer goods, potentially for months. You cannot spend that money because you need to be able to refund it, but you're also carrying the risk of storing and protecting that money because it's technically yours.
Along with this some payment processors explicitly forbid pre-orders because of this. It can resulr in a lot of chargebacks aanf other issues when a product doesn't ship when originally estimated
> Preorders generate risk for a business, because you take money and owe a customer goods
This is true if you capture funds up front, but preorders don't necessarily _need_ to work like that.
There are payment types/options (at least in the UK) where you can pre-auth the payment but not actually capture the funds until later - so you technically don't have the customers' money.
You can also take refundable deposits (slightly more risky, but risk is mitigated by clear terms and conditions that you're not guaranteeing availability or a fixed delivery date). Even a low-value deposit can also be a very useful signal for "actual demand" which can be helpful for capacity planning.
Source: have run pre-ordering system for large volume sales online in the UK + as a customer I've recently paid a $10 deposit a few months ahead of a US product launching in Europe (only paying the full balance when they emailed me to say they were ready to ship).
You're right that with some workarounds you can reduce the negative impact of preorders on your business and turn it into a net benefit, I was just talking about valid business reasons not to invest time and effort into them.
Preorders can be a very nice gesture for customers, but they're no business necessity by any means. Implementing a new payment option (or, more likely, processor), setting up some kind of refund assurance system, dealing with customer support for cancellations, it all takes effort and time away from other parts of your business. I don't think the effort will be worth it until a shop can ship large enough volumes to need better capacity planning. From what I can tell, Pine seems to ship however many complete kits they can get their hands on. With the delays and issues in China/US shipping corridors, the availability of stock will probably be a bigger and more important issue to work on than the stock planning.
I don't know, if you're fundamentally in the business of selling things, making it easy for customers to at least show you a clear intent to buy, and even better, backing that commitment with actual money, seems like a bit of a no brainer in many (most?) cases.
I appreciate supply may be the constraint rather than sales, but even more reason to lock in the sale now as best you can, as opposed to letting the customer go elsewhere in the meantime.
By the time your supply chain issues ease, sales then may become the constraint again (because people have moved on, the season has changed... whatever).
I don't discount your points about the time and effort required, but it doesn't seem clear cut to me that it's not worth doing.
Perhaps. I think the key question is how quickly the cost of alternatives goes down relative to oil.
But if Greenland is the last reserve of oil left on the planet, the value of that oil will be astronomical. Holding off on drilling during cheap oil is a good investment.
1) There is still an expectation women will marry up, and men will marry down, in terms of income potential. If the woman is a little bit ahead, it's okay, but e.g. a doctor marrying a nurse is perceived as acceptable in one direction, but taboo in the other. This means there is a growing shortage of mates for men at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, and increasingly, women at the top (unless college-age and pretty).
2) Overlapping and poorly-defined roles make for a lot more conflict in marriages.
3) Divorce laws vary by states, but in the most liberal states, tend to be punitive towards men; the de facto standard is women get the kids, and men pay (massive, debilitating) child support. At the same time, the legal industry works hard to increase divorce rates. With half of marriages ending in divorce, this leads to all sorts of misaligned incentives and imbalances which are taboo to talk about, but interplay in complex ways. Marrying down is now a huge liability.
4) And, as you pointed out, social classes are much more likely to calcify.
We kind of got to where we are randomly, without thought or planning. We had a bad system (women were oppressed), and we pushed hard against it. It snapped. We landed somewhere pretty random and still pretty dysfunctional; just dysfunctional in other ways.
As a man, I simply refused to to marry.
It's just a legal contract which is potentially life destroying for me.
Still, I have a pretty traditional family without the titles: only one of us is working and it makes sense for both of us. This is likely going to change when kids are bigger and we have more time, but at the same time, we're close to not be in full time employment for someone else. We will likely work in our own business because we enjoy doing it, more than for the money we make.
I think what's important, in today's society, is to not be career driven.
Corporations chew you, you end up wasting your life and your family is unstable because there's no one home for the kids.
Equal working opportunity for both genders are great, but feminism preached being career driven too much.
Society adapted to having two working parents per family, wages stagnated while prices increased thanks to double the workers available and thanks to double purchasing power.
Divorces and single parenting, unstable families are what created this problematic generation.
In business, finance, housing, consumption we are expected to bide by a contract. Yet, somehow partnerships are exempt from this rule.
Could you imagine if startups were run this way? "Hey a legal contract is potentially life destroying for me. So just take me at my word and do this secret handshake. That should be good enough." We'd laugh them out of the room.
That's probably because partnerships are not an upfront contract and termination terms are negotiated post-hoc, which is completely unlike "business, finance, housing, consumption" contracts.
For some reason prenuptial agreements aren't that big of a thing, and I'm not even sure they would hold any water in Europe.
So when I enter a contract with a business, before signing, I know who owes what and what happens if someone fails to provide that. Also, we know what it means to fail to provide. Usually, "Meh, I'm just not happy anymore" isn't a part of that.
So I totally understand people (usually men) not wanting to enter a contract where they face a significant probability of being taken to the cleaners.
If my company fails to deliver a service to a client, or the product delivered is subpar, it's clear what the penalties are.
And those penalties are established upfront. If in the meantime my company goes from a thousand dollar startup to a multi-billion dollar enterprise, I don't suddenly owe an angry client half of what I own. I still owe them what we agreed beforehand, which may be an insignificant sum. Even if it's somehow thanks to them that we became a huge company.
It's my understanding that marriage doesn't work like that.
Relationships often happen under circumstances where no sane person would sign a contract. My girlfriend and I currently both share an emotional risk. If one of us is unhappy in the relationship and leaves, the other suffers emotionally. That risk is roughly equal, though. The likelihood of harm and the magnitude of harm are equal, as is the likelihood of happiness and the magnitude thereof.
I am much better off than my girlfriend financially, though. Marriage introduces a financial element wherein I bear a substantial financial liability, in exchange for effectively no likelihood of financial gain. On the other hand, she bears no financial liability, and in fact gains a likelihood of financial gain. No sane person would sign a contract like that with a business. It would be like Amazon buying out a startup with a contract that says if the merger isn't successful, the startup gets to keep half of Amazon.
Another reason contracts aren't analogous is because marriage is an intensely emotional affair. There is no sane way, that I can think of, to make emotional restitution. What's the point of having a contract that's unenforceable because there is no reasonable restitution?
So you end up in a spot where for some people, the benefits of marriage are unenforceable (not that I'm saying they should be enforceable) but the liabilities are very much enforceable. I'm not aware of any common contracts in business, finance or housing that follow that kind of a paradigm.
And yet in the real world small businesses still frequently operate on handshake deals between people who have known each other for years. Most of the time it works out.
Nobody's even going to mention the effect of welfare here, either, which subsidizes single motherhood and each additional child out of wedlock? Or the effect that this has had especially on the families of minorities?
Unfortunately, it doesn't fit with the narrative of more welfare, more taxes which allows both parties to increase government spending and gain even more power.
Welfare polices do not subsidize single motherhood as much as punish intact families where the man cannot find work. In that way it does create perverse incentives that are harmful to families it is meant to support.
Can you elaborate, I'm not familiar with this part
I know of the scenario where a man has to check in to jail when they cannot successfully pay the alimony or child support, which doesn't help their ability to do that. basically debtor's prisons.
how would marriage be life destrying as opposed to living together without being married?
interestingly, i believe germany has something like a concept of a "living arrangement similar to a marriage" which is completely informal, it's not something you chose but it is defined by a court simply based on the reality of how you live together. the result of that is, to my understanding, that if you separate, one party can still sue the other for eg. splitting your assets, etc. as for child support, the relationship status should not even matter, regardless if you are married, or even live together. you are the father after all, so you are partly responsible for your children. if you earn, you pay.
in other words, you get the downsides of a relationship without the upsides of being married.
In the US, marriage is bound by laws created by an active divorce lobby. Divorce is a huge industry.
In my state, divorce, for a men, generally means paying roughly 1/3 of your income in child support, and splitting child-rearing expenses after that. To most people, that's financially devastating.
Before:
Mom earns $100k, $66k after taxes
Dad earns $100k, $66k after taxes
After, Mom gets $88k after taxes, dad gets $44k after taxes.
Uneven income, and Mom gets alimony too.
Mom signs kids up for a $24k/kid child care with 2 kids. Dad pays $24k and is left with $20k for his own living expenses. Mom is left with $62k. Many Moms do things like this punitively, because they hate Dad. Dad is living in poverty, and it's life-ending. Mom is using child support to buy fancy clothes for herself.
Does you partner have health insurance? Will she be able to make decisions for you, visit you in the hospital, or inherit your assets, if something were to happen to you? There are many legal benefits to marriage.
Are feminists forcing women into focusing on their careers or just giving them the option? AFAIK there are still plenty of women who are want to lean out and do the housewife thing. I mean “Real Housewives of X” is one of the most long running and popular tv franchises in the US.
Raising a child and building a home and life for a family is expensive. I know a lot of dudes who are stressed because they partner decided to become stay at home moms but also, “please buy a house”.
Anecdotally, I’ve also heard a few women balk at the idea of the husband being the stay at home parent. And I know a few dads who would love to be home more but can’t because they became the default breadwinner.
That’s not a partnership.
I don’t know who to attribute this to but you know what they say: “The only correction is an over correction“.
> Raising a child and building a home and life for a family is expensive.
This is an important point. I don't think feminism is trying to limit options but in practical terms if you have a mix of two income and one income households competition between them will drive up basic costs such housing so that running a one income household is significantly more expensive than back when most households were one income.
You can try address this via tax, as many European countries do. But then two income households feel unfairly penalised.
Most of the work under the label of feminism has been about creating options, there are many people that try to leverage the movement to be more exclusionary and say some options are wrong in favor of a mental corporate career. From my experience this has been women that go as far as to invalidate the decision making ability of other women that are not choosing a corporate career like that.
I'm building ParttimeCareers (https://parttime.careers) to tackle this problem. I think part-time remote jobs can be reasonable accommodation for people who want to work and take care kids. Basically, you'll just need to work 4 or 5 hours per day or less if you spread it into weekends.
> Equal working opportunity for both genders are great, but feminism preached being career driven too much
I encounter more and more women that literally apologize to me as a disclaimer before they say they want children and to raise them in person most of the day, as their form of empowerment involves only corporate career aspirations and they also call this feminism. This is just in casual conversation.
Hilariously they are also apologizing excessively, which is not progressive at all but just so safe that it's a tougher habit to break.
Well how do you make the family more stable? Maybe by marrying and creating a legal contract that will encourage you not to do something stupid that will destroy your life and destabilize your family.
That's half of ALL marriages in the US, not half of first marriages. Only 41% of first marriages end in divorce in the US, and rates are much lower in the EU, and the UK.
I've looked into it several years ago and a product was trialed, but basically you can't insure events that are bound to happen, you need to bolster the insurance pool.
I and a few others don't have any issue abstracting all topics into their economic realities, including the marriage concept that the state offers in its entity catalogue. I think many more people could do that as well, it is just convenient to deflect and pretend marriage isn't about that, convenient for typically one party in any case.
It's not like someone is forcing you to get married. Also 41% as a top line number doesn't tell the whole story. Among college educated Americans the rate is ~29% and falling year over year.
Also prenuptial agreements are a thing for a reason.
It will take collaboration between genders to reconcile
Right now it is convenient for misandrists to just laugh at the concept of men complaining, and never even noticing that misandry is a character flaw - let alone a word
I think some of this is correct, but would like to push back on a few points.
2. I think that some amount of redundancy in skills and roles is helpful. Being able to exchange roles and responsibilities fosters adaptation of the family unit to changing circumstances and new opportunities.
3. Is this because divorce laws favor women or because men are usually the primary breadwinners while women are the caretakers? High earning women also have to pay alimony and split the community property they paid for.
Is it really lawyers that are driving divorce rates? It’s not like they are showing up unsolicited and sowing discontent in otherwise happy relationships.
> High earning women also have to pay alimony and split the community property they paid for.
They ended #3 by saying marrying down is the liability, which would be true for all spouses of all genders. But in a world where men are still overwhelmingly making the unilateral choice to marry, this is mostly about the incentives that men are prudent to weigh.
IANAL, but you're obviously not one either. A lot of what you said is false.
You don't read legal text like a piece of code. Contracts and licenses don't work like that. It took me a long time to wrap my head around this.
Contracts and licenses are built on:
1) Things need to be substantially the same. If I offer to build a house for you with Brand X super-plywood flooring, and it's sold out, I can build it upgraded to Brand Y corkwood flooring since Brand X plywood was sold out, and it's substantially equivalent for the purpose, and that's okay. On the other hand, if Brand X introduces a new low-cost plywood flooring that technically qualifies but obviously isn't what we meant, you've got a case.
I can't imagine any court will care about 4b being on a per-file versus per-repo basis.
2) Damages. There isn't a magic genie which throws contract-breakers or license-breakers in jail. The extent to which these matter is damages. If I break an agreement with you, you need to care enough to sue me. Beyond that, a court will award damages, and you'll need to show you were harmed somehow, or entitled to statutory damages.
I'm not sure how you'd show you were somehow damaged by a change like whether license text is per-file or per-repo.
Contracts are written by lawyers who keep all this in mind. That's why I hire lawyers to help interpret contracts; a plain language read is often misleading. My advice is read the licenses with a lawyer, or at least someone with a basic background in contracts and licenses. Goodness knows there are bad lawyers out there, but even those will give better advice than a stranger on the internet.
Disclaimer: This is specific to common law systems, and perhaps not all of them. But that's how the US works.
"You can't relicense something that is Apache 2.0 as AGPL. You need explicit approval of every single contributor" is false.
Anyone can take an existing Apache 2.0 project and change the license to AGPL 3.0. This does not require the approval of any prior contributor. Of course people can continue using versions released under Apache 2.0 under the terms of that license, but even then "approval of every single contributor" is irrelevant. See https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html
The situation where you do need the approval of past contributors is when you want to switch between incompatible licenses. For example, if they had previously released it as AGPL 3.0 and wanted to move to Apache 2.0.
> Anyone can take an existing Apache 2.0 project and change the license to AGPL 3.0.
No, you cannot. The very page you've linked to makes this clear:
> Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects, because the GPLv3 license accepts our software into GPLv3 works
This is precisely what I've written. You can also apply the AGPLv3, you cannot remove the Apache 2.0. The contributions made under Apache 2.0, are still under Apache 2.0. The Apache 2.0 allows sub-licensing, so any contributor who uses those contributions from now is accepting them under the AGPLv3 and Apache 2.0. The former does not supplant the latter.
If we were to read this like a piece of computer code, the incompatibility would be mutual. GPL code does not permit further restrictions. "You cannot remove Apache 2.0" would be a further restriction. Ergo, you couldn't incorporate.
It's just that this isn't how you read or interpret legal text.
The linked page is correct. You can incorporate/sublicense Apache code into GPL code. You can't do the reverse.
Please, please stop telling people they can go ahead and do something.
Also, please stop suggesting that reading a license is a bad idea. That's horrible advice. (For readers, see comment below).
We're expected to sign/accept agreements near daily. The very nature of legal agreements is such that they must be written in a fashion that is clear in it's meaning, or else there's ambiguity in its interpretation, which means courts are not going to enforce it.
Of course it's ideal to sit down with a lawyer when doing so. However, it's pathetically idealistic to pretend that every open source project on Github has done just that.
The Apache 2.0 is its own license. There's nothing in the Apache 2.0 license about the GPL.
GPL was written by the GNU Foundation and they have their own interpretation about what licenses are compatible. Seems as that list isn't incorporated in the license itself, they're nothing more than guidelines.
> This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.
> Please note that this license is not compatible with GPL version 2, because it has some requirements that are not in that GPL version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification provisions. The patent termination provision is a good thing, which is why we recommend the Apache 2.0 license for substantial programs over other lax permissive licenses.
Even the GNU Foundation acknowledge that extra requirements of the Apache 2.0 make the license incompatible with the GPLv2. They do however claim it's GPLv3 compatible.
Great, their interpretation is that GPLv3 software can include Apache 2.0 software. Good on them. GNU Foundation (and the Apache Software Foundation) are not involved in the legal agreement made between a contributor and an open source project. Their opinion is irrelevant.
The open source project has to adhere to the legal agreements they have made!
Licenses aren't magic, they're the same as every other agreement two parties make. If you want to update the terms of an agreement you've made with someone - you need a new agreement, with all parties involved!
Note that it's not uncommon for EULAs to contain clauses stating they're free to arbitrarily alter the terms, time and time again these clauses have been ruled as invalid.
In this case, by removing the Apache 2.0 license text, and not adhering to the terms of the Apache 2.0, Minio are not adhering to agreement they've made with contributors. It's really that simple. What the GNU Foundation claim is irrelevant, they're not a party involved in that agreement.
I could write a license right now:
> By adhering to this totally legit license, you're also in adherence with all other agreements you've ever made, but like, you don't need to follow their terms anymore, just our terms. Is all good. Don't worry.
That's not how licenses work. It's complete insanity that anyone could possibly think that a third-party has the right to alter the agreement, or interpretation of an agreement you've made with someone else.
Mind you, the GNU Foundation aren't stupid, nowhere do they claim that the GPLv3 can supplant Apache 2.0. They just say they'll permit Apache 2.0 in GPLv3 software. They most certainly do not claim you no longer need to honour the Apache 2.0. That's nonsense.
Stop, just stop it.
EDIT: Just to clarify, here is what the Apache 2.0 license says about incorporating Apache 2.0 licensed software in another project with a different license:
> You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.
Note that they specifically permit that, as long as you continue to comply with the conditions of Apache 2.0 license.
> The linked page is correct. You can incorporate/sublicense Apache code into GPL code. You can't do the reverse.
That's not what Minio have done! Have you opened the link?
They deleted the Apache 2.0 license from the entire repo. Removing the Apache 2.0 license is an egregious violation of the Apache 2.0 license's terms.
On the topic of software engineers exhibiting poor comprehension...
> IANAL, but you're obviously not one either.
That ought to have been clear from the first two sentences of my comment.
> I can't imagine any court will care about 4b being on a per-file versus per-repo basis.
You can imagine all you like. I'll leave that to the courts themselves.
Suggesting people (even with a superfluous IANAL disclaimer) make legal decisions based on what you imagine courts will do is just poor advice; legal or otherwise.
> 2) Damages [...]
I haven't mentioned damages because it's not relevant. If you think the concept is new to me, you're quite welcome to peruse my recent HN comments.
Infringement and damages are unrelated concepts. Will someone have to pay substantial damages for infringing in the way described? Probably not, but that doesn't change the fact infringement took place. It also is going to vary wildly depending on the circumstances involved.
Some jurisdictions have minimum damages that are owed simply if an infringement takes places, irrespective of any other details of the infringements.
It's just outright poor advice to suggest people make legal decisions based on what they can imagine.
There's also a very big difference between what I'm suggesting and what you're suggesting. You're telling people to go ahead and do something. I'm telling them not to do something.
Perhaps I'm being overly conservative, but you're quite right, unless you're sitting down with a lawyer (which let's face most open source projects are not) then don't make assumptions. Just follow the license precisely to the best of your ability, until you've got specific legal advice (and insurance) to protect you if something goes wrong.
EDIT: This really shouldn't be relevant. Because honestly it shouldn't add any credibility to my statements.
No I don't sit down with lawyers every time I make decision that has legal implications - that's impossible. However, I do have first hand experience dealing with copyright/licensing lawyers specifically over IP infringement due to a third-party violating the license of software I wrote. No, it wasn't just a discussion. Lawyers took action, and infringement stopped taking place - it did not reach the courts.
Again, that shouldn't add any credibility to my claims. I have zero credibility here, as does mostly everyone else. Just read the damn license.
Most of this is nonsense, but I'll point out a few things:
> "Infringement and damages are unrelated concepts"
No. They're the same concept. Infringement is okay if there are no damages. That's how a lawyer reads a contract. You're merely confusing types of damages. There are many ways to calculate damages. You're describing statutory damages. You usually run the calculation all ways, and take the greatest number which applies (but not always). That's how you might get into hundreds of thousands of dollars of damages for an MP3 collection.
> "unless you're sitting down with a lawyer (which let's face most open source projects are not)"
No, this isn't right. Most major free software projects do have access to lawyers. I've worked on several, and what I did was always reviewed by in-house counsel (and not just one organization). Even if there isn't a corporate sponsor, that's what a lot of the free software / open source not-for-profits do. I've had conversations with volunteer counsels too. Most minor projects generally won't need a sit-down session with a lawyer, but if they want access for whatever reason, it's not rocket science either:
1) Look into your social network. I have 3 or 4 lawyers who went to the same college I did. When I have a legal question, I do call them up. For something as simply as the nonsense you're spouting, any lawyer can set you straight.
2) If you are doing work at a company above a hundred people, it will have an in-house counsel. Shoot them a quick email. Most are friendly; that's what they're there for.
3) If you're not (1) or (2), you probably have someone like me in your network.
4) And if all else fails, you can go to the right meetup.
My experience is that for a volunteer project, open source, or similar, most lawyers are glad to chat.
> "Just read the damn license"
This is just about the worst advice on HN. Your options:
1) Read the license with a lawyer
2) Read the license as well as articles from actual lawyers about the license
3) Learn enough about law to read the license correctly.
You're misreading the licenses, and that's what's dangerous. It's kind of like referring people to WebMD over a doctor.
Stop intertwining complete nonsense with tropes in order to try add credibility to your outrageous claims.
- IANAL.
- Get a lawyer.
- You probably know a lawyer.
Thank you for adding absolutely nothing to the conversation. The only common theme is that you think you shouldn't interpret a license yourself and act upon that.
What little substance is present in your comments is however in direct contradiction to that. You proceed to interpret a license, and tell people that violating it is fine, because the courts will probably think it's fine.
What? I just really hope anyone reading this can see through the tropes and realise you're in no position to be giving out advice.
The only advice I've given is read the licence, and to the best of your ability, act with accordance with the license. I'm 100% okay with that.
EDIT:
> Look into your social network. I have 3 or 4 lawyers who went to the same college I did. When I have a legal question, I do call them up.
> My experience is that for a volunteer project, open source, or similar, most lawyers are glad to chat.
These claims are highly dubious.
There are several lawyers in my extended family. I went to school with many more. They most certainly are not "glad to chat" about legal matters. Giving out any advice that may be construed as legal advice is a huge deal for them. You either know highly unprofessional lawyers, or you're making this up.
I drove a revisiting like this in more than one organization.
Fitting decisions like this around the status quo makes no sense. It's exactly actions like this which change the status quo. I'm happy to say there are dozens of organizations without AGPL bans thanks to one useful piece of code I wrote. Most are small, but one is in the tens of billions of dollars in valuation.
I don't think AGPL is a perfect license, but I do think it's the best.
The flaws it has are things like the poorly-written patent clause, verbosity, ambiguity on concepts like linking, and general lack of elegance. It runs into a lot of corner cases around where code looks like data or data looks like code; there isn't a clean separation.
GPLv2 was a brilliantly-drafted license.
For all those failings, AGPL seems like the right choice for people who want their code feeding into an open ecosystem, rather than coopted by corporate giants.
Except of course the corporate folks who are licensing under AGPL who can and do then take contributors code and make available a commercial version that no one else is allowed to make available.
AGPL is a poison pill license that creates a very distorted open source model - better example is "shared source" - you can look but can't really use it in you own ops.
The whole AGPLv3 / GPLv3 thing was such a mess - a big move towards trying to tell people how to use the code. I think long term GPLv3 and AGPLv3 die out.
> Except of course the corporate folks who are licensing under AGPL who can and do then take contributors code and make available a commercial version that no one else is allowed to make available.
This is only true if there is a CLA, and contributors sign it.
The work around folks use is to claim just new stuff is agpl and skip contribs sign off. After stuff is mixed gets harder to pull apart. AWS just had to go through that exercise with elastic search
I'll have dinner with virtually anyone, and I'll try to understand them. I also have a lot of historical books, including one written by a genocidal dictator who killed a lot of my countrymen. I try to understand him too.
If you're expecting to convince people, it sounds like you're putting in the wrong effort. The goal of a conversation is understanding, not agreement.
"Here, let us rationally discuss the issues, but regardless of what you say I'm going to go back and vote for [their candidate]" is exactly how a conversation ought to go. If your expectation is different, it's not them. It's you.
If I fly to Japan, my goal is to understand Japanese culture. My goal isn't to Americanize it. And vice-versa. It's no different here. You're not going to successfully impose your values on other people.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles" - Sun Tzu
The problem, I believe, is that there is no effort being made to understand me. My side is very fond of publishing books and articles about how they think and what their values are (cf Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Frank, etc). I've never seen a similar effort from the other side.
I'm not as optimistic as Sun Tzu about my ability to win simply by understanding. Perhaps it works in a physical combat, where every human being has a physical limit that can be overcome. In a political system, there are no limits: a vote is a vote, and if they wish to vote in ways that harm me, I cannot change that by any effort, regardless of what I understand.
If efforts to demonize me are sufficiently effective, nothing I understand will help me. And I believe we've reached that point. I can only implore people to understand me, and failing that, protect myself as best I can. That includes not wasting time on dinners with people who wish me harm. I will not enjoy them. Nor will it produce anything of value.
I haven't flown anywhere. It's as incumbent on them to adapt to me as it is for me to adapt to them. This is my country too, and if they're treating me as a hostile foreigner trying to impose his ways on them, it will not end well.
open source > proprietary > proprietary with activation servers > SaaS
All of those have bins within them too. For example, Google SaaS, or bootstrap startup, will be lower continuity than vendors known for LTS.
Business continuity also changes the buy-build dynamic in ways not always factored in.