In order to safeguard the long-term innovation, sustainability, and collaborative spirit of NetBird, we are switching to the AGPLv3 license - ensuring it remains a powerful, community-driven resource for decades to come.
Looks like AGPL is a new norm? Redis switched to AGPL too. SSPL is also common on the server side. Curious of how you view AGPL vs. SSPL and choose the former.
Honestly I think it's fair. Really the only people affected by this change are people creating proprietary forks, everyone else benefits from this change.
I just wish there was a way to ensure that the company itself doesn't do a proprietary fork.
Licensing talk is confusing to someone not steeped in it. I talked to Claude about it 1-2 weeks ago when it was first announced and it was framed as a reinforcement of FOSS ideals.
I actually made the jump from tailscale -> netbird last month. Definitely more work and learning, but much more aligned w/ my perspective of self-hosting and open-source software. (Yes I thought about headscale but the YouTube reviews of netbird won me over).
I think that's perfectly fair. The community is quick to put whoever builds commercial OSS software on a cross the moment they change their license to ensure they still have a competitive advantage. Instead, we should encourage commercial OSS companies. COSS companiesare one of the only venues for creating high-quality OSS projects that you can self-host.
>The BSD-3 license, under which NetBird has operated until now, is a permissive license. It was instrumental in our early growth, offering maximum flexibility and encouraging wide adoption. However, this permissiveness also presents a significant long-term challenge with an imbalance where the value created by a community can be captured and privatized, ultimately undermining the sustainability of the open-source project itself. Well, AGPLv3 addresses this imbalance.
How is this logic not literally Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
When given the choice, there are very few cases where I don't pick the open source product. The peace of mind it won't be shutdown on you, the confidence the company has in their code quality, or the option to ignore migrations and stay on previous versions is worth way more than featureset deltas.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadI just wish there was a way to ensure that the company itself doesn't do a proprietary fork.
I actually made the jump from tailscale -> netbird last month. Definitely more work and learning, but much more aligned w/ my perspective of self-hosting and open-source software. (Yes I thought about headscale but the YouTube reviews of netbird won me over).
I personally think the definition of open-source is problematic (and clearly biased by the lobbies of hyperscalers). Why aren't n8n or MongoDB considered open-source? (https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md, https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/community-edition) Why does requesting that others not sell your product make the project not open-source?
How is this logic not literally Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
https://vadosware.io/post/the-future-of-free-and-open-source...