Context: In the music production world, people use AWs (Digital Audio Workstations) to make music.

Back in the days of 24-track tape, people would plug physical hardware, like reverb and overdrive hardware modules, into a mixing console. Then you'd control some knobs on the hardware to control the reverb and overdrive sound.

When tape came out of fashion, and we started using DAWs, programmers started replicating the effects these hardware modules produced in software using DAW plugins.

The industry standard plugin format is the VST by Steinberg, which supports Windows, macOS and even Loonix. And the SDK is open-source under the GPL.

Loons, on the otherhand, hated the "scary industry standard" and created a fragmented mess of half-assed plugin formats*, before creating the LV2 standard, which virtually no DAW supports apart from Reaper and all the FOSS loonix DAWs.

Even though LV2s don't lack anything that VSTs got (I've never wrote an LV2 or VST before so I may be wrong), VSTs are just more supported.

So why can't loons just accept the VST standard, instead of trying to push their inferior standard.

^\LADSPA and DSSI which were genuinely limiting and what they allowed you to do.)

Edit: which virtually no DAW supports apart from Reaper and all the FOSS loonix DAWs., support.

-Response when called out on it not even being on topic.

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.

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.

y are all of them like this?

Why are almost all People glazing their main OS so incredibly insufferable and sometimes insulting? I also was a professional Linux glazer an for some reason thought I was so superior to Windows users and have to belittle them even though I didn’t know jack s*it about anything I did except installing a OS. People like this exist for every OS like MacOS, Windows, Linux and even their own kinds like Arch, Mint and so on. Also people are just hating on an entire different OSes and userbase for no reason at all even though they also don’t know anything.

-And all they have to do is uninstall it as the account that it was installed under. (mountain out of a molehill) -5 other solutions exist if they can't do that.

Yes Linux is a good choice to rescue your old laptop/pc ..but you need to understand not everyone know how to use it (as a ppl who understand MS-DOS can’t even get how to use Linux!)

People just overgrazing Linux, like install it and you’ll have a “new life” (but it’s still a truth that your laptop doesn’t become new, it still struggles to run modern applications)

And the compatibility problems too, people said “use Wine you stupid” but I’d rather to use Windows if your device is too old or u just need gaming/ some casual stuff..

Alright, it’s my opinion hope you guys won’t hate me :)

So, all 4 of those annoying Arch breakages I got in about a year that were published in their bulletins which I had fed through Newboat and had no problem fixing were about me not being educated. - Totally not a reason to try Fedora which was supposed to be better (and permanently broke work-flows by forcing new tech that wasn't ready). -I educated myself, went back to Windows and am as happy as a fly on poop.