[Qwuke]

"First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you" I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose. So, even under this definition it is not free or open source.

The GNU Project and Richard Stallman, who made this statement, would agree that it's not free under even this earliest definition. They in-fact made it even clearer when they defined freedom of "use" as the distinct 0th freedom eventually to make it even clearer that being able to use the software freely is fundamental to their idea of freedom. Again, freedom isn't about price, it's about usage, availability, redistribution and lack of restrictions on this. I cannot freely redistribute FSL licensed code under the original definition of free software.

"Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then."

Yes, the GNU project were acutely aware of this and designed the GPL licenses around such scenarios - they just didn't design it for SaaS businesses, where if you redistribute the built program externally after modifying it but only distributed its responses over a network, you technically weren't obligated to open source that modification. AGPL resolved this issue, and has more case law behind it than this 2 year old license, and has certainly less daunting implications than a not legally well defined 'competing purpose'.

Wrt to the legal concerns with AGPL, they're not actually that it wouldn't provide any protection, but rather that it might offer the originally distributing entity too much power: legal power to declare all software used in the stack to produce a network request MUST be made source available. I have not seen any lawyer concerned with whether or not Amazon would be able to bypass its protections, and the license was made by lawyers to clearly provide protection. Did you create this legal theory yourself? Because I've not seen any writing from a lawyer on the internet that suggests that Amazon could firewall themselves off in a friendly jurisdiction under any reading of the license, and I read a lot of AGPL lawyerblogging.

Sentry, the company who created FSL, even states that this license restricts user freedom explicitly - for the sake of the business interests of the original developer.

So summing up.. Richard Stallman, the FSF, the GNU Project, the OSI, the creators of the FSL, the company now currently using FSL, all agree that this source available license does not meet the definition of "free software". So, whose definition are we using out of thin air?

[sarchertech]

>I can't do this with FSL unless it's a permitted purpose.

You’re free to distribute it to your neighbors for free for any purpose. You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one. You just can’t commercialize it as a competing product.

“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.

This isn’t my favorite license, but it provides a lot more freedoms than merely looking at the source code.

With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.

[Qwuke]

>You’re free to distribute it for a fee for almost any purpose save one.

So it does not meet the original free software's required freedoms, and is therefore not free software?

>“Source available” again calling this source available is disingenuous. You’re deliberating using the least free term that is technically accurate.

No, the source is available to read and the software is not free based on the historical definitions you're providing, unfortunately. Happy to understand from a different lens, but Stallman specifically meant freedom in the way even FSL writers agreed with.

Also, please refrain to using commonly used terms in the common way as 'disingenuous', it doesn't lead to interesting discussion and is how these threads end up needing to be patrolled by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>With respect to AGPL providing “too much control”. That is a valid and likely reason for courts to find it unenforceable.

So, this is a personal non-legal theory that does not have a basis in jurisprudence, then? GPLv3 is proven as enforceable, and is what AGPL is based on. No court in any legal system would throw away a license based on giving "too much control". That's just not how copyright or licensing contracts work. You may want to disclaim conjectures like this with IANAL..