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Cake day: July 14th, 2024

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  • The difference is that commercialization is inherent with a free (libre) open source license. Whereas going against the intent, but still legally gray area, is imo malicious compliance because it circumvents what the license was intended to solve in the first place.

    But that’s all i really care to add to this convo, since my initial comment my intent was just to say that the AGPLv3 license does not stop corporations from getting free stuff and being able to charge for it-- especially documentation. Have a good one


  • No. I said even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license [by making the open sourced code unusable without the backend code or some other means outside of scope of this conversation] then they can charge for it.

    The malicous part is in brackets in the above paragraph. The license is an OSI approved license that allows commercialization, it would be stupid for me to call that malicious.




  • AGPL is the most restrictive OSI approved license (of the commonly used ones), but it is still a free (libre) open source license. My understanding is just that the AGPL believes in the end-users rights to access to the open source needs to be maintained and therefore places some burden to make the source available if it it’s being run on a server.

    In general, companies run away from anything AGPL, however, some companies will get creative with it and make their source available but in a way that is useless without the backend. And even if they don’t maliciously comply with the license, they can still charge for their services.

    As far as documentation goes, you could license documentation under AGPL, and people could still charge for it. It would just need to be kept available for end-users which i don’t think is really a barrier to use for documentation.









  • Yes, oracle will reclaim your server if it falls under certain thresholds for the resources you’ve signed up for. So it might be better to request less resources then you need but this will somewhat complicate things if you want more resources in the future since iirc you can’t simply resize.

    One way to get around all of this though is convert to pay as you go (PAYG). PAYG gets the same always free allocations and you only pay for use above that, and oracle won’t reclaim PAYG (at least not my server for ~4 years). Just set up a budget of a $1 and then alerts to email you if you reach 1% of your budget. If you somehow go over your free resources it’ll tell you.

    Lastly in some cases oracle just straight up loses your data or disables your account. As always practice 3-2-1 backups (don’t rely on the free rotating backups on their servers as your only backup).

    It’s some hoops to jump through but i was paying $5/ month for a digital ocean droplet and the oracle server has been running for 4 years now, and i also have scaled up one project and started a few others that wouldn’t have all fit on my droplet. Other than the threat of reclaiming my resources before i switched to PAYG I’ve been pretty happy with it.