Square’s terms of service forbid use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores

https://github.com/moll/node-pg-error/issues/1

It also seems worthwhile to examine the differences between the APGL and the recently introduced (and much critiqued, albeit I find somewhat unfairly, in some aspects) SSPL:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352171

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301116

The above should let you find the answers to your questions, but I'll use this comment to also point to some less on topic but still very much related to licensing granularity matters.

Compare the various FSF licenses to the OSET license:

http://www.osetfoundation.org/public-license

Two specific things I find rather atrocious about all the FSF licenses seem easiest to highlight by pointing out what the OSET license does to explicit avoid these pitfalls:

1. "Sovereign Immunity. Contracting with governments brings up a special issue that doesn’t apply to anyone else: normally, if you grant a license to government, you may not be able to sue for a violation because governments can be immune from legal claims. We ask recipients to waive this restriction, so there is a remedy if the recipient does not abide by the terms of the license. See Section 9.2 of the OPL"

2. "The OSET Foundation (then the “OSDV Foundation”) attained its full tax-exempt status under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code declaring us a public charity in the 3rd quarter of 2013. In the course of seeking this status, as part of a negotiation⁴, we agreed to make certain changes to the license to ensure that our source code is free for everyone to use. Section 5.3 of the 2.0 license now requires that a licensee who does not abide by the terms of the license must make the Covered Software available in Source Code Form on a publicly available computer network for a period of no less than three (3) years. This goes beyond the source code delivery requirements of standard open source licenses. Section 5.4 reserves the ability of a licensor under our license to seek injunctive relief for violation of the terms of the license. It is not clear at this point whether a court could, under applicable law, order a violator to release source code. But we cannot control the law, only our license. Therefore, if that remedy is available under law, we want to make sure it is available under our license as well."

And then, even more peripherally related, none of the libre licenses I know have some variants for transcopyright, a licensing concept almost forgotten, and outlined by Ted Nelson, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3l7CpnpyGw

At this point, I really wish we'd have some sort of mathematically sound "mix and match" license generator, where you can pick what you want your license to do with extreme granularity, based on as detailed of a parameterization of what one might do with Software licenses in general, and get a standardised, reproducible license build.

There does exist this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_Expression_Language

But it doesn't actually really do what you might expect it to do.

For example, compare these two RDFs for the GPLv2, and the GPLv3:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.rdf

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.rdf

The GPL v3.0 RDF pulls in http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ as an additional XML Namespace, and has a logo, but in terms of the actual ccREL encoding, they seem completely identical, both just contain this:

I wonder if it's about control. With a SaaS you can switch to a competitor. It's possible to switch between GNU/Linux distros and the companies that support them. Change is possible. This can protect you from a vendor tanking or who has bad behavior.

Oracle is an outlier. They aren't going away. There's enough business to keep them around. And, many companies are trying to get away from them slowly.

When you have an AGPL and commercial dual license it puts that vendor in control. Do big businesses like putting others in a position of power and control over them? If that business is small or a startup do they want to have that as a hard dependency? Is it a risk to the big business?

This isn't about paying for commercial licenses. It's about risk mitigation. Something big businesses do a lot of.

>Just my impression after 5 minutes of research. If someone has more detailed legal position please do correct whatever I got wrong.

after 5 minutes of Googling. downvoting my personal research results after 5 minutes of Googling won't get anyone to answer with the corrected version. I had never heard of agpl until I googled it and summarized what I saw.

It's a summary. if you put up a web app where you modify open source software as part of your stack, you have to publish those changes if people ask for them. Even if you are not distributing those changes. (This is my impression.)

I look forward to a correction from an expert - it's why I posted what I found. (Yes, what I found was outrageous.)