> This just doesn't doesn't make sense to me lol. If that's the case, why would the licensors add more clause? They're basically irrelevant.
Licensor can add extra clauses as long as it doesn't introduce any restrictions to the freedom granted in AGPL. If the new clauses clash with the freedoms granted in AGPL, the license allows users to treat these additional restrictive clauses as not applicable to them. The provision to add more clauses in AGPL is to only provide more protection of the freedom of the user (the main intent of the FSF license). For example, to plug some loophole that the FSF did not consider.
> A user might have wrongly thought that AGPL meant they could resell it, and ignored reading the added clause.
AGPL license doesn't restrict a user from commercialising an AGPL software and redistributing it. So a user cannot be faulted here if they chose to ignore any additional restrictive clause stating that user can only use it non-commercially.
> But they also said that the intended clause from the authors mattered, not the interpretation of the user,
That's the part of the ruling causing the debate - FSF supporters feel in such a case, it means the judge chose to ignore that it is an AGPL license from FSF (thus choosing to ignore the intention and principles behind it), and perhaps chose to treat it a derivative but new license by the author(s) of the software. Hence their ruling that it not "open source and free".
The FSF doesn't choose what license my work is under. If I decide to use one of their templates such as AGPL and then I add more terms and conditions, it is clear I'm trying to add restrictions. The FSF has no authority on my copyrighted code and what terms I want to license it under.
But the FSF seems to assert that in fact, it was trying to sneakily prevent a copyright author from adding additional clauses if they chose the AGPL as a template for their license, by tricking them into not realizing that any additional clauses they'd add could simply be removed by the users.
This is what I find very preposterous. Luckily the Judge ruled against that, and asserted the rights of the copyright authors to be in control of their own license terms.
It's one thing to licence my code in a way that says, no one else can add more conditions to the use of my code, which is fine and what the judge said applied here, but it is another to license my code in a way that says that my own additional terms are dismissabble and non enforceable, which sounds from the OSI article like this was the intent from FSF.
There could be a question of are you allowed to reuse the AGPL license template if you are to add additional terms? Are there copyright on license templates themselves? But that's a very different debate, and it would be pretty crazy to need a license for the use of a license text. No license template currently provide such a license to my knowledge.
> If I decide to use one of their templates such as AGPL and then I add more terms and conditions, it is clear I'm trying to add restrictions.
And you are free to do that. But you cannot call it an AGPL license any more, especially if it clashes with the original intent of the AGPL license - to provide users the right to the source of the software, to modify it, and to redistribute it commercially or non-commercially under the same license directly or indirectly (SaaS).
The court also partly endorsed this position by asserting that Neo4j was doing false advertising by claiming its software was "free and opensource" because the changes made to the license invalidated this.
> Are there copyright on license templates themselves?
Some commenters have claimed here that they do, but they are also "open source". I don't know about that. But I am sure FSF has valid grounds to argue that if one of their license is changed to invalidate their original intent, such license shouldn't be referred to as an FSF license (like GPL or AGPL). That's what Neo4j was doing - they were calling their license "AGPL with Commons Clause". And even the judge pointed out that this was false advertising.
Which makes sense - Firefox is opensource, but if you modify it to include malware and redistribute it as Firefox, Mozilla will obviously not like that as you are damaging their brand. (Ofcourse, that would be a trademark dispute, not a copyright one).
Licensor can add extra clauses as long as it doesn't introduce any restrictions to the freedom granted in AGPL. If the new clauses clash with the freedoms granted in AGPL, the license allows users to treat these additional restrictive clauses as not applicable to them. The provision to add more clauses in AGPL is to only provide more protection of the freedom of the user (the main intent of the FSF license). For example, to plug some loophole that the FSF did not consider.
> A user might have wrongly thought that AGPL meant they could resell it, and ignored reading the added clause.
AGPL license doesn't restrict a user from commercialising an AGPL software and redistributing it. So a user cannot be faulted here if they chose to ignore any additional restrictive clause stating that user can only use it non-commercially.
> But they also said that the intended clause from the authors mattered, not the interpretation of the user,
That's the part of the ruling causing the debate - FSF supporters feel in such a case, it means the judge chose to ignore that it is an AGPL license from FSF (thus choosing to ignore the intention and principles behind it), and perhaps chose to treat it a derivative but new license by the author(s) of the software. Hence their ruling that it not "open source and free".