@timconsidine said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:
Being fully open source is a red-herring IMHO.
I love Cloudron, I promote it and recommend it because as you say it is the most accomplished platform in that field, plus I love the community and have massive respect for the two main developers, for their skills and the great software they make but also because of their friendly attitude, their care for customer support and the way they engage with users. Plus while Cloudron is not Free Software the code source is out there for any to inspect so that's great in terms of users knowing what the software actually does and that's good enough for me.
However, the point of Free Software is not only about how things are now but also about future proofing. Things might change in the devs' lives, they might need to move on, they might need a lump of cash cause something terrible happen and sell the company, or whatever else. And if the new devs have a different ethics what do we do? Look for another software and all the time and energy spent on Cloudron is kinda wasted and then not as many people benefit from this amazing platform? And to be honest the current situation makes it hard to recommend it and promote in some context because not everyone is just interested in the best software or value for money but also care about software license but ethical and practical reasons.
I don't have a perfect solution as I understand and respect Girish and Nebulon's current position in that they don't want someone to just fork everything and release it for free.
Maybe something could be added in the license that says the code must be made publicly available, and that if the license changes to a more restrictive one (one that removes the public release of the code), then the current license reverts to a Free Software license e.g. AGLP 3.0 or its successor. This would basically guarantee Freedom 0 and 1 and would implement some kind of (twisted) copyleft. And that would be enough to make me happy 🙂
But I don't know if that is possible at all?? I'm a legal geek but not on software license...yet 😉 Anyone know?