> MySQL is a successful product that was sold to Sun / Oracle for a BILLION dollars

"Successful exit" is not the same thing as a sustainable product or business model. I mentioned several key concerns in my previous reply, which you didn't address here at all. Specifically, if dual-licensed GPL was the best way to go, it wouldn't be the case that entities outside of MySQL/Oracle (e.g. AWS) were capturing a huge amount of MySQL's value/revenue, possibly exceeding that of the product's own revenue. Why else would development be shifted to the managed-service-only, closed-source MySQL Heatwave product?

> MariaDB and Percona Server are good examples of competing businesses

Yes, I'm very familiar with the MySQL ecosystem (click my profile). I mentioned several concerns specifically about MariaDB in my previous reply and you did not address those at all.

You also didn't answer my question about whether you've ever run a commercial open source business, so I must conclude that you haven't. I do, and frankly I don't appreciate when other people -- who seemingly don't havie direct personal experience in this area -- attempt to confidently lecture me about how I supposedly chose the wrong license.

Listing Red Hat in your reply also seems a bit ridiculous, given all the latest contention in that space over Red Hat threatening to cancel customer subscriptions if they republish RHEL's sources. If GPL-based software was the panacea you claim, things like this wouldn't be happening with ever-increasing frequency over the past couple years.

> ... if dual-licensed GPL was the best way to go, it wouldn't be the case that entities outside of MySQL/Oracle (e.g. AWS) were capturing a huge amount of MySQL's value/revenue ... Why else would development be shifted to the managed-service-only, closed-source MySQL Heatwave product?

And do you realise that you are comparing corporates with two completely different philosophies and business model? It's absolutely in character for Oracle to use the loophole in the older GPL (that has since been fixed by the AGPL) to try to make MySQL closed-source again by offering it through a SaaS infrastructure. Oracle has never been a champion of the opensource movement, while the original owners of MySQL were. It is the same with IBM, who are now the owners of Red Hat Linux. And that shows in how they ran / run their business.

We are discussing about opensource software business models only. Not open-source and closed-source ones (it should be a no-brainer that closed-source software business models are the most successful and profitable ones).

> I mentioned several concerns specifically about MariaDB in my previous reply and you did not address those at all.

Simply because it is irrelevant to our discussion. The success or failures of MySQL or MariaDB or Oracle's MySQL was/is not just solely because of its license and there are many other factors behind it (for example, MariaDB earned a lot of scorn from open source developers because they felt betrayed after its original source - MySQL - ended up in Oracle's hand). Nevertheless, MySQL is a great example of a commercially successful example of a dual-licensed GPL product.

I have enough business experience, and a good understanding of open source software to understand its strength and limitation in a commercial setting. Honestly, you do need a lecture for not being able to see the obvious:

1. As per your own confessions, a competitor was able to use your open source code without sharing subsequent work on the codebase. This would obviously have never happened with the AGPL license, as the license compels others who distribute the software (even as SaaS) to share the source code.

2. You tried to change the codebase and / or license to make it more difficult for them to fork your code and use it. This shows your own confusion regarding the open source philosophy and your business model. Your code was used by others in the spirit of the open source license you chose. And yet, you continue to assert you are the wronged party?

3. It is also easy to see that you (wrongly) chose a permissive opensource license out of self-interest to your business (hoping to attract more developer contributions and then close source the product later when it becomes profitable, just as your competitor did) than out of an equal commitment to the open source philosophy. Your competitor outwitted you because you weren't knowledgable about licenses, your own business goals and business model.

> Honestly, you do need a lecture for not being able to see the obvious

You are making a ton of reading comprehension errors, as well as completely incorrect assumptions about the situation I described. And then lecturing me about those incorrect assumptions. Cool cool.

> a competitor was able to use your open source code without sharing subsequent work on the codebase.

No, that's not what I said at all. I described how a company used one of my open source libraries in a way which directly competed with my primary product. The problem here is they did share their changes, and those changes included functionality which was already present only in the enhanced paid closed source edition of my product.

This is why I said it was a "hostile fork" of my library: users could combine the open source edition of my product with the hostile fork of my library to get functionality for free that normally is only in my paid product.

I absolutely understood that this situation was possible with a permissive license. I just did not expect a company to do this so soon after my paid product launched, especially as the product wasn't even financially successful yet by that time.

> This would obviously have never happened with the AGPL license

I can say with absolute certainty, if my product had an AGPL license, it would not have succeeded in any form. Many of my largest users do not adopt AGPL software under any circumstances.

> You tried to change the codebase and / or license to make it more difficult for them to fork your code and use it.

The former, not the latter. I never tried to change the license, nor said anything about that here. I changed the codebase so that the previously-external library was now an internal package instead of a standalone repo, and refactored things to prevent compatibility with the hostile fork.

> Your code was used by others in the spirit of the open source license you chose. And yet, you continue to assert you are the wronged party?

My code was used in a way which negatively impacted the revenue stream which would pay for further development of that code. As I've said elsewhere in this subthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37084057, the license is entirely neutral about that topic: it neither encourages nor discourages such use. However, I assert that common sense should typically discourage people from such antisocial behavior, because you can reasonably expect that kneecapping the revenue stream for a project can result in that project either getting killed off or radically changing shape in response.

> you (wrongly) chose a permissive opensource license out of self-interest to your business (hoping to attract more developer contributions

I never said anything about "hoping to attract more developer contributions" and that has never been my motivation for open sourcing this work. I described why I chose an open source license directly in a sibling subthread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083698

> and then close source the product later when it becomes profitable, just as your competitor did

You're just completely inventing false details here out of thin air!

My product has two editions, a FOSS one and an enhanced paid one; the latter is closed-source. Both editions already existed at the time of the events I'm describing here. Both are still actively developed and supported, and today they're widely used by companies you are definitely familiar with.

The library in question was one component of this product, not the product itself.

Meanwhile the startup that made the hostile fork of the library runs a managed service (SaaS).

> Your competitor outwitted you because you weren't knowledgable about licenses, your own business goals and business model.

I guess it's easy to conclude whatever offensive thing you'd like when you just make up all the details instead of reading the thread or asking questions about the situation!

Anyway this is completely off the rails of my original point, which is that there are multiple kinds of "freeloaders". Some of them actively destroy the thing they're taking for free, which was why I made the Little Free Library analogy. Just because something is "free" (as in beer) doesn't mean there should be an expectation that the thing will continue to exist in that form once abusive bad actors exploit the free-ness of the offering.

We're seeing this play out over and over again across many FOSS projects, and my prediction is this trend will only accelerate.

> The real value of an FSF license, like the AGPL, is that it was designed to protect the copyright holders, and its users, “right to repair”. And thus, it cannot be closed source by anyone (apart from the original copyright holders) once released under the said license

17 USC Sec. 203 suggests that may not be strictly true in the US.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203