The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
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The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
1–10 of 341 posts
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#2In reality, MIT"ish" or don't use it.
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#3Yeah. People often resort to some fear-mongering when it comes to AGPL. When we released our software under AGPL, one developer of a somewhat competing app didn't find anything better but to claim that 'AGPL license makes it a useless toy'. Well, we don't agree.
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#4Awesome article! I was in an organization which had an AGPL ban. After a couple of months with lawyers, it's now a major AGPL supporter. AGPL lets you build ecosystems around your software, where everyone contributes, and no one can parasitically compete with you. It's absolutely the right tool for a lot of uses.
I'm no longer with the organization, but it had:
* Hundreds of open-source contributors
* Millions of users, mostly paying
* Zero direct competitors using the software. With equal ground for technology, it'd be almost impossible to overcome first-mover and branding advantage unless the organization really messed up
* Hundreds of major open source users doing interesting things with the software and using it in non-competing contexts. That translated into product enhancements.
With GPL or BSD, it almost certainly would have played out as lots of competitors doing an extend-and-proprietize, and instead of a successful open company, it would have been a dead organization.
So many misconceptions abound.
The flip side, though, isn't that everyone should use the AGPL. You should have the right license for the right context.
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#5> Any derivative works of AGPL-licensed software must also use the AGPL.
TBH, I'm interpreting this statement just like Google is:
> Google states that if, for example, Google Maps used PostGIS as its data store, and PostGIS used the AGPL, Google would be required to release the Google Maps code.
What's the definition of 'derivative work' here?
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#6> Any derivative works of AGPL-licensed software must also use the AGPL.
That's why people don't use AGPL, and why I personally don't release any code under (A)GPL. If you want to make free software, make free software and release your code under Apache or MIT. And if you really care about attribution, use CC BY 3.0. Legally, you don't want to deal with the burden of constantly checking if you're complying with some license that a dependency of a dependency of a dependency is using.
> By discouraging the use of AGPL in the broader community, Google hopes to create a larger set of free- and open-source software that they can take for their own needs without any obligations to upstream...
This is true, and I don't see much wrong with it. I don't like the idea of other code mandating how I should release my code. What if I just don't feel like up-streaming? Free is meant to be free, and (A)GPL does incur a cost -- at the bare minimum an ideological one.
A lot of reactionary down-voting going on; I'm quite open to debate. Why are you so passionate about AGPL?
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#7I have significant responsibility for setting open-source policy at my company. We require specific review on a facts-and-circumstances basis of any AGPL usage.
Why? Because for most open-source licenses, it's clear how to avoid any license controversy entirely by simply never conveying the licensed work. If I don't ship you ("convey to you") any binaries, I have no obligations to you under GPL (or MIT or Apache, obviously). For the most part, we don't ship anyone outside the company binaries, so compliance (both in fact and in provability of that fact) is relatively easy. Not so with AGPL.
If there was critically useful code only licensed under AGPL, we'd consider it, of course. But it would get a lot more review than a typical Apache/MIT/GPL license situation. I have no philosophical objection to AGPL; I just find it a much less practical license than most of the other, much more commonly used, licenses.
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#8Yeah, making some of my recent projects AGPL truly scares away contributions from Googlers (as their internal, low friction patching process doesn't apply to AGPL software, and they have to go through explicit approval). Fun.
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#9Agree that some of the examples cited are misrepresentations of what the AGPL requires, but I think, for many companies, just the requirement to publish changes (if any) would be a showstopper. Which is unfortunate, but I think is the reality of the situation.
Re: The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with
#10> Google states that if, for example, Google Maps used PostGIS as its data store, and PostGIS used the AGPL, Google would be required to release the Google Maps code.
I can’t see that statement, or anything like it, in the linked article. Am I missing something?