u/Rare-Paint3719

I know y'all love OnlyOffice, and you may have even heard of a little-known database called MongoDB. What's common between them? Both are corporate projects that shipped an AGPL-licensed core, with proprietary enterprise features bolted on top.

Here's the thing though. AGPL isn't a shield the community holds together. It's a weapon, and the only question that actually matters is who's holding it. When one company owns all the copyright, the weapon points wherever they want, including at the terms they sold you on in the first place. When they don't, things get more interesting.

Take MongoDB. They started under plain AGPL, no tricks. By 2018, cloud vendors were hosting MongoDB as a paid service and keeping the profits. MongoDB called this exploiting a loophole, but it wasn't a loophole. It was the license working exactly as written, letting anyone, including a company with the resources to host it at scale, exercise the freedoms AGPL grants.

So MongoDB didn't sue. They didn't test the clause in court. They just stopped offering the license. In October 2018, they replaced AGPL entirely with the Server Side Public License, a license they wrote themselves, forcing anyone offering MongoDB as a service to open source their entire stack, not just their changes. They could do this because they held the copyright outright. No fork, no negotiation, no fight required, because none was possible. One party held the gun the whole time.

Elastic ran the same play, in both directions. In 2021, facing the same AWS-hosting complaint as MongoDB, they dropped Apache 2.0 for a dual SSPL/Elastic License setup, explicitly to stop cloud vendors from reselling their work without paying up. AWS forked the code into OpenSearch instead of complying, and by early 2022 the two companies had settled their trademark dispute.

Then in September 2024, Elastic added AGPL back in, as a third option alongside the licenses they'd never actually dropped. Their own shipped product still runs under the restrictive terms. The AGPL option applies to a portion of the source, offered for goodwill, timed for the exact moment doing so cost them nothing, since the competitor it was originally meant to fend off had already left to build its own thing. Same lever, same hand on it, pointed wherever suited them at the time.

Now take OnlyOffice, because this is where the gun changes hands.

Back in 2021, they quietly added a term to their AGPL license, buried at line 655. It required any fork to keep the OnlyOffice logo. Except in the same breath, they also banned anyone from using their trademark, which includes their logo. So you're required to display something you're legally barred from using. That's not sloppy lawyering. That's a trap, built years in advance, designed to make forking look illegal without ever saying "you can't fork this."

Nobody called the bluff until this year. Nextcloud and Ionos forked OnlyOffice into Euro-Office, an EU-backed Microsoft Office alternative. Within days, OnlyOffice accused them of violating the AGPL and killed an 8-year partnership with Nextcloud over it, timing that suggests they'd been waiting for the excuse.

Here's the difference from MongoDB and Elastic: OnlyOffice didn't actually own this fight. They didn't have a CLA sitting in a drawer letting them just rewrite the rules and walk away, because Nextcloud and Ionos were never dumb enough to sign one. So instead of relicensing, OnlyOffice had to go argue that their own words meant what they wanted them to mean. Bad move. The text didn't cooperate.

The FSF, the people who actually wrote the AGPL, told them to sit down. A logo isn't a "reasonable legal notice." Bolting a trademark restriction onto it doesn't make it one either, it just makes the whole clause an illegal "further restriction" under the license's own Section 10.

OnlyOffice backed off, but they never admitted the claim was bogus. They just quietly stopped once picking a fight with an EU-backed consortium in public started looking like a bad idea. Nothing here was legally settled, no court touched Section 10. What actually happened is Nextcloud and Ionos ripped the disputed terms out themselves, said so publicly, and the FSF backed them up. The weapon OnlyOffice reached for got yanked out of their hands and pointed right back at them, because for once, they weren't the only one in the room holding a claim to it.

That's the actual difference between all three companies. Not whether AGPL is strong or weak, not whether it protects communities in principle. It's whether one party holds the whole gun. MongoDB and Elastic did, and the license bent however they needed. OnlyOffice didn't, and it didn't.

AGPL doesn't protect communities. It protects whoever's holding it. The only real due diligence on a copyleft project was never reading the license text. It's checking who signed the CLA.

I know y'all love OnlyOffice, and you may have even heard of a little-known database called MongoDB. What's common between them? Both are corporate projects that shipped an AGPL-licensed core, with proprietary enterprise features bolted on top.

Here's the thing though. AGPL isn't a shield the community holds together. It's a weapon, and the only question that actually matters is who's holding it. When one company owns all the copyright, the weapon points wherever they want, including at the terms they sold you on in the first place. When they don't, things get more interesting.

Take MongoDB. They started under plain AGPL, no tricks. By 2018, cloud vendors were hosting MongoDB as a paid service and keeping the profits. MongoDB called this exploiting a loophole, but it wasn't a loophole. It was the license working exactly as written, letting anyone, including a company with the resources to host it at scale, exercise the freedoms AGPL grants.

So MongoDB didn't sue. They didn't test the clause in court. They just stopped offering the license. In October 2018, they replaced AGPL entirely with the Server Side Public License, a license they wrote themselves, forcing anyone offering MongoDB as a service to open source their entire stack, not just their changes. They could do this because they held the copyright outright. No fork, no negotiation, no fight required, because none was possible. One party held the gun the whole time.

Elastic ran the same play, in both directions. In 2021, facing the same AWS-hosting complaint as MongoDB, they dropped Apache 2.0 for a dual SSPL/Elastic License setup, explicitly to stop cloud vendors from reselling their work without paying up. AWS forked the code into OpenSearch instead of complying, and by early 2022 the two companies had settled their trademark dispute.

Then in September 2024, Elastic added AGPL back in, as a third option alongside the licenses they'd never actually dropped. Their own shipped product still runs under the restrictive terms. The AGPL option applies to a portion of the source, offered for goodwill, timed for the exact moment doing so cost them nothing, since the competitor it was originally meant to fend off had already left to build its own thing. Same lever, same hand on it, pointed wherever suited them at the time.

Now take OnlyOffice, because this is where the gun changes hands.

Back in 2021, they quietly added a term to their AGPL license, buried at line 655. It required any fork to keep the OnlyOffice logo. Except in the same breath, they also banned anyone from using their trademark, which includes their logo. So you're required to display something you're legally barred from using. That's not sloppy lawyering. That's a trap, built years in advance, designed to make forking look illegal without ever saying "you can't fork this."

Nobody called the bluff until this year. Nextcloud and Ionos forked OnlyOffice into Euro-Office, an EU-backed Microsoft Office alternative. Within days, OnlyOffice accused them of violating the AGPL and killed an 8-year partnership with Nextcloud over it, timing that suggests they'd been waiting for the excuse.

Here's the difference from MongoDB and Elastic: OnlyOffice didn't actually own this fight. They didn't have a CLA sitting in a drawer letting them just rewrite the rules and walk away, because Nextcloud and Ionos were never dumb enough to sign one. So instead of relicensing, OnlyOffice had to go argue that their own words meant what they wanted them to mean. Bad move. The text didn't cooperate.

The FSF, the people who actually wrote the AGPL, told them to sit down. A logo isn't a "reasonable legal notice." Bolting a trademark restriction onto it doesn't make it one either, it just makes the whole clause an illegal "further restriction" under the license's own Section 10.

OnlyOffice backed off, but they never admitted the claim was bogus. They just quietly stopped once picking a fight with an EU-backed consortium in public started looking like a bad idea. Nothing here was legally settled, no court touched Section 10. What actually happened is Nextcloud and Ionos ripped the disputed terms out themselves, said so publicly, and the FSF backed them up. The weapon OnlyOffice reached for got yanked out of their hands and pointed right back at them, because for once, they weren't the only one in the room holding a claim to it.

That's the actual difference between all three companies. Not whether AGPL is strong or weak, not whether it protects communities in principle. It's whether one party holds the whole gun. MongoDB and Elastic did, and the license bent however they needed. OnlyOffice didn't, and it didn't.

AGPL doesn't protect communities. It protects whoever's holding it. The only real due diligence on a copyleft project was never reading the license text. It's checking who signed the CLA.

I know y'all love OnlyOffice, and you may have even heard of a little-known database called MongoDB. What's common between them? Both are corporate projects that shipped an AGPL-licensed core, with proprietary enterprise features bolted on top.

Here's the thing though. AGPL isn't a shield the community holds together. It's a weapon, and the only question that actually matters is who's holding it. When one company owns all the copyright, the weapon points wherever they want, including at the terms they sold you on in the first place. When they don't, things get more interesting.

Take MongoDB. They started under plain AGPL, no tricks. By 2018, cloud vendors were hosting MongoDB as a paid service and keeping the profits. MongoDB called this exploiting a loophole, but it wasn't a loophole. It was the license working exactly as written, letting anyone, including a company with the resources to host it at scale, exercise the freedoms AGPL grants.

So MongoDB didn't sue. They didn't test the clause in court. They just stopped offering the license. In October 2018, they replaced AGPL entirely with the Server Side Public License, a license they wrote themselves, forcing anyone offering MongoDB as a service to open source their entire stack, not just their changes. They could do this because they held the copyright outright. No fork, no negotiation, no fight required, because none was possible. One party held the gun the whole time.

Elastic ran the same play, in both directions. In 2021, facing the same AWS-hosting complaint as MongoDB, they dropped Apache 2.0 for a dual SSPL/Elastic License setup, explicitly to stop cloud vendors from reselling their work without paying up. AWS forked the code into OpenSearch instead of complying, and by early 2022 the two companies had settled their trademark dispute.

Then in September 2024, Elastic added AGPL back in, as a third option alongside the licenses they'd never actually dropped. Their own shipped product still runs under the restrictive terms. The AGPL option applies to a portion of the source, offered for goodwill, timed for the exact moment doing so cost them nothing, since the competitor it was originally meant to fend off had already left to build its own thing. Same lever, same hand on it, pointed wherever suited them at the time.

Now take OnlyOffice, because this is where the gun changes hands.

Back in 2021, they quietly added a term to their AGPL license, buried at line 655. It required any fork to keep the OnlyOffice logo. Except in the same breath, they also banned anyone from using their trademark, which includes their logo. So you're required to display something you're legally barred from using. That's not sloppy lawyering. That's a trap, built years in advance, designed to make forking look illegal without ever saying "you can't fork this."

Nobody called the bluff until this year. Nextcloud and Ionos forked OnlyOffice into Euro-Office, an EU-backed Microsoft Office alternative. Within days, OnlyOffice accused them of violating the AGPL and killed an 8-year partnership with Nextcloud over it, timing that suggests they'd been waiting for the excuse.

Here's the difference from MongoDB and Elastic: OnlyOffice didn't actually own this fight. They didn't have a CLA sitting in a drawer letting them just rewrite the rules and walk away, because Nextcloud and Ionos were never dumb enough to sign one. So instead of relicensing, OnlyOffice had to go argue that their own words meant what they wanted them to mean. Bad move. The text didn't cooperate.

The FSF, the people who actually wrote the AGPL, told them to sit down. A logo isn't a "reasonable legal notice." Bolting a trademark restriction onto it doesn't make it one either, it just makes the whole clause an illegal "further restriction" under the license's own Section 10.

OnlyOffice backed off, but they never admitted the claim was bogus. They just quietly stopped once picking a fight with an EU-backed consortium in public started looking like a bad idea. Nothing here was legally settled, no court touched Section 10. What actually happened is Nextcloud and Ionos ripped the disputed terms out themselves, said so publicly, and the FSF backed them up. The weapon OnlyOffice reached for got yanked out of their hands and pointed right back at them, because for once, they weren't the only one in the room holding a claim to it.

That's the actual difference between all three companies. Not whether AGPL is strong or weak, not whether it protects communities in principle. It's whether one party holds the whole gun. MongoDB and Elastic did, and the license bent however they needed. OnlyOffice didn't, and it didn't.

AGPL doesn't protect communities. It protects whoever's holding it. The only real due diligence on a copyleft project was never reading the license text. It's checking who signed the CLA.

I know y'all love OnlyOffice, and you may have even heard of a little-known database called MongoDB. What's common between them? Both are corporate projects that shipped an AGPL-licensed core, with proprietary enterprise features bolted on top.

Here's the thing though. AGPL isn't a shield the community holds together. It's a weapon, and the only question that actually matters is who's holding it. When one company owns all the copyright, the weapon points wherever they want, including at the terms they sold you on in the first place. When they don't, things get more interesting.

Take MongoDB. They started under plain AGPL, no tricks. By 2018, cloud vendors were hosting MongoDB as a paid service and keeping the profits. MongoDB called this exploiting a loophole, but it wasn't a loophole. It was the license working exactly as written, letting anyone, including a company with the resources to host it at scale, exercise the freedoms AGPL grants.

So MongoDB didn't sue. They didn't test the clause in court. They just stopped offering the license. In October 2018, they replaced AGPL entirely with the Server Side Public License, a license they wrote themselves, forcing anyone offering MongoDB as a service to open source their entire stack, not just their changes. They could do this because they held the copyright outright. No fork, no negotiation, no fight required, because none was possible. One party held the gun the whole time.

Elastic ran the same play, in both directions. In 2021, facing the same AWS-hosting complaint as MongoDB, they dropped Apache 2.0 for a dual SSPL/Elastic License setup, explicitly to stop cloud vendors from reselling their work without paying up. AWS forked the code into OpenSearch instead of complying, and by early 2022 the two companies had settled their trademark dispute.

Then in September 2024, Elastic added AGPL back in, as a third option alongside the licenses they'd never actually dropped. Their own shipped product still runs under the restrictive terms. The AGPL option applies to a portion of the source, offered for goodwill, timed for the exact moment doing so cost them nothing, since the competitor it was originally meant to fend off had already left to build its own thing. Same lever, same hand on it, pointed wherever suited them at the time.

Now take OnlyOffice, because this is where the gun changes hands.

Back in 2021, they quietly added a term to their AGPL license, buried at line 655. It required any fork to keep the OnlyOffice logo. Except in the same breath, they also banned anyone from using their trademark, which includes their logo. So you're required to display something you're legally barred from using. That's not sloppy lawyering. That's a trap, built years in advance, designed to make forking look illegal without ever saying "you can't fork this."

Nobody called the bluff until this year. Nextcloud and Ionos forked OnlyOffice into Euro-Office, an EU-backed Microsoft Office alternative. Within days, OnlyOffice accused them of violating the AGPL and killed an 8-year partnership with Nextcloud over it, timing that suggests they'd been waiting for the excuse.

Here's the difference from MongoDB and Elastic: OnlyOffice didn't actually own this fight. They didn't have a CLA sitting in a drawer letting them just rewrite the rules and walk away, because Nextcloud and Ionos were never dumb enough to sign one. So instead of relicensing, OnlyOffice had to go argue that their own words meant what they wanted them to mean. Bad move. The text didn't cooperate.

The FSF, the people who actually wrote the AGPL, told them to sit down. A logo isn't a "reasonable legal notice." Bolting a trademark restriction onto it doesn't make it one either, it just makes the whole clause an illegal "further restriction" under the license's own Section 10.

OnlyOffice backed off, but they never admitted the claim was bogus. They just quietly stopped once picking a fight with an EU-backed consortium in public started looking like a bad idea. Nothing here was legally settled, no court touched Section 10. What actually happened is Nextcloud and Ionos ripped the disputed terms out themselves, said so publicly, and the FSF backed them up. The weapon OnlyOffice reached for got yanked out of their hands and pointed right back at them, because for once, they weren't the only one in the room holding a claim to it.

That's the actual difference between all three companies. Not whether AGPL is strong or weak, not whether it protects communities in principle. It's whether one party holds the whole gun. MongoDB and Elastic did, and the license bent however they needed. OnlyOffice didn't, and it didn't.

AGPL doesn't protect communities. It protects whoever's holding it. The only real due diligence on a copyleft project was never reading the license text. It's checking who signed the CLA.

The problem with the GPL/AGPL is that the copyleft is not restrictive enough. All it does is force derivative works to be FOSSed under GPL and companies looking to use it to discourage competition will quickly into some loop-holes.

For one, AGPL only requires FOSSing changes made to the app, when providing it as a service. This means that if a big cloud provider like AWS provides your microservice as a service without any modifications, they can free-load off of your shit.

Therefore, you need to look at some source-available or proprietary solutions.

So Elastic is good for the guy that wants a fake-permissive license. It's main cklause is an anti-SaaS clause, but it doesn't prevent forks from making proprietary changes per say. That may be a problem if you don;t want any competition.

SSPL solves this by forcing the hosting stack itself to be SSPL'd, under the premise that AWS will never SSPL their hosting stack. The viral copyleft also prevents anyone from making proprietary changes to your software. The license only fails if AWS agrees to do SSPL their hosting stack.

BUSL, is also nice because it has a onc-ompete clause which can arguably restrict SaaS. And for the FOSStard users that loved when your project was Apache 2.0 licensed, you can promise them that Apache 2.0 after four years of the release date.

FLS is the same thing but 2 years instead of 4 years, the choice between Apache 2.0 and MIT relicensing, and some other opinionated stuff.

So in short, permissive alows proprietary forks (competition); GPL and AGPL allow SaaS freeloading (another form of competition); and SSPL, EL, BUSL and FSL are the the only real winners here.

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BTW, since you own the copyrights to the software, you can do whatever you want with it. Just because it's licensed under SSPL or Elastic License, does not mean YOU, the owner of the software, have to follow it. You can SaaS the hell out of it while others can't, meaning no competition.

I know this is going to piss people off but I don't care. Everyone I know who goes to therapy is more obsessed with their problems than before they started. You're paying someone to sit there and tell you you're a victim and calling it healing.

Anxiety is a normal human emotion. You're not supposed to feel good all the time. The second we started calling normal stress a disorder we gave everyone permission to fall apart over nothing. Half the people claiming to have anxiety just need to get off their phone and go outside.

Therapy is a racket. You go in sad you come out with a label and a bill. Nobody gets better they just get better at describing why they can't.

I hate u/basedchad21 because of Rule 1 of r/linuxbad. It's too reasonable of a rule. A mod has to give a reason for why they banned someone? And tenporary bans are preferred over permabans?

I'm sorry but that's not how reddit mods are supposed to act. They're supposed to be unreasonable and powerhungry tyrants who can ban you for simply hating you.

Edit: thank you to the anon who gave me an award and the anon who reported me to reddit as suicidal. Love you all.

Edit 2: It's not Rule 0, it's Rule 1: Mod Accountability.

Hello. I've been noticing that browser threads always turn into people listing what they hate about their current browser, but rarely into people actually describing what they'd build if they could start from scratch. That got me wondering if there's more overlap in what people want than it seems, or if everyone here is actually chasing something completely different.

So I figured I'd just ask directly. If you could design your own browser exactly how you want it, what would it actually look like and how would it work? Doesn't matter if you're thinking about the interface, the way tabs or extensions work, the engine underneath, or something else entirely, just describe whatever your version of the perfect browser would be.

Curious to see how much people converge on versus how much everyone wants something completely different.

Imma speed run this simple. If Company A makes the next best document DB and releases it under AGPL, and company B adds new features and makes it "betterc" Company A can integrate their changes preventing the competition from one-upping them.

Hello,

I was looking to tinker around with Vivaldi and saw a post on your blog stating that the C++ patches to the backend (ad blocker, etc.) are FOSS while the UI, shipped as minified JS, is not FOSS. However, in the latest source tarball, the only minified JS I can find is under ui/webui/game and ui/webui/privacy_report.

Does the source tarball include any proprietary/closed-source components besides possible Vivaldia? If so, which folders or files fall under that license?

Thanks.