> if it was AGPL, we wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

And so you wouldn't participate in the developer's disgust. All positive to me. AGPL FTW.

No one wanting to touch your software because of a license is FTW how?

For the sake of argument, you could say it's about the right people "touching" your software, especially if you dual license it so that people who don't want the unpleasant AGPL terms pay some money for the benefits they're receiving.

After all, cloudkick doesn't seem to mind if some people don't touch it with a ten foot pole because of the price.

I think it's a tradeoff: with GPL style licenses, you risk excluding potentially valuable community members who use your code in their own proprietary applications, but may give something back. On the other hand, sometimes those people/companies give nothing back, and some people find that irritating.

So his problem is, basically, that his software is too good...?

We have a customer who decided to renegotiate our support contract for this reason. They cut a chunk out of our support hours and took away money from the contract when they realized the call volumes were tiny compared with their previous service provider.

We had better visibility into their 200+ client sites, automated processes, stability, gave their employees nothing much to do, and, unfortunately (in hindsight), provided good tracking of support incidents. These were the things we were asked to do in the contract, and we did it well, and we paid the price for that. If it was a little more faulty, involved more 'busyness' from the people on their side, and had poor visibility into the overall system we would not have lost that chunk of money. We did not have to be this good, just reasonably better than the old system.

Cannot really complain though - from their perspective, this cut was one way to save money. Just business. Funny business.

Unfortunately this confirms one of my fears with FOSS. The better the software, the worse the business model works. I hear politicians call for more open source because it creates local support jobs. Software shouldn't create jobs. It should kill jobs so other higher value jobs can be funded somewhere else in the economy.

Yes.

It sounds bizarre, but open source software that is not quite good enough builds a much larger community that one where its 'all done'.

Why not?