A Case for Proprietary Software

I am a free software advocate, but I have limits. I can think of three reasons not to publish my own code or not to always use "free" licenses.

EDIT: This mostly only applies to server-side code, as that's most of what I've written. I don't have a strong opinion about this when it comes to compiled code, as I have no experience with it.

1. Opsec

Publishing your code can be a huge opsec risk. Maybe you have commits under an old handle. Maybe you have an oddly unique code style. Maybe you use an obscure programming language. Maybe you want to publish anonymously (via Tor or I2P). Or maybe you have a "contact me" page on your blog that you want to not publish the history of (ahem). Sometimes you can get away with publishing an archive of the code without the VCS (e.g. git) history, but other times merely publishing any amount of the code would be enough to dox you. This is especially true of server-side code, where any kind of code could have generated that same HTML or JSON response.

This doesn't just apply to you. If you release your code under the AGPLv3, everyone running your code will have to show their work too, meaning their opsec could be at risk too. For this reason, I used a permissive license for my upcoming comments system replacement, dsc.

2. Scraping

Scrapers are often highly dependent on the markup of the site they're scraping. Publishing your scraping code accelerates the cat and mouse game you're playing with the site you're scraping, making it harder to accomplish your goals with the software in the first place.

3. Disagreements about what licenses are free

I like the SSPL. I don't really plan to use it for my own code, as I find that the AGPLv3 is enough, but I'm not gonna fault anyone for using it. Why? I think it's not unreasonable to show your work for everything needed to run the software, including backup scripts. It might violate the OSI, sure, but I don't really care about the OSI anyway :) I still think it's an open source / free software license. Copy far left is cool, when it doesn't fall under the previous two reasons.