upvote
The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.

If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.

reply
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.
reply
They're right, but they're presenting it in a way as if the toxicity of AGPL is the actual truth, and not just the opinion of greedy corporations.

Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.

reply
But it’s not only toxic to the greedy corporations but all the others as well, hence
reply
Why is it toxic for me to need to push my code to a git repo if I start using it in my services, if I'm not trying to act as a for-profit corporation?
reply
How so? You might be thinking of SSPL.
reply
Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.
reply
You can just take someone else's permissively licensed code and relicense it AGPL, or even proprietary if you want to. Corporations want it proprietary but the same trick works for copyleft.

For bonus points make sure your fork has better SEO than the original, so when someone who heard it's permissive embeds it in a proprietary product, you can sue them.

reply
Was assuming worse case scenario from a licensing compatibility and copyright perspective.
reply
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
reply
Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
reply
I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.

I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.

I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.

reply
In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.
reply
If he wants to make money he needs to sell licenses, not give them away for free. To that end, making the free version AGPL is generally a good move. It ensures people can get hooked on your product and when they start working at corporations they have to pay to keep using it.
reply
Greedy corporations, such as those founded by Y Combinator, want to take without giving.
reply
That's a bold accusation. Can you cite actual examples of this alleged malfeasance?

Do YC CEO's dress in all white like Boss Hogg?

reply
Any potential customers that matter have already been advised by their lawyers to not touch AGPL with a 10 meter pole. This includes Google:

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

This extends way beyond the superficial toxic license stuff. There is a lot of legal ambiguity around copyleft licenses and most companies just don't want to deal with it unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

reply
No money from investors
reply