Comment by mappu
3 days ago
You can see the spirit of what they're going for also with the MIT binaries - that's also like saying the whole project is AGPL, but a loosening for using it as-is.
Given their goals seem to be
- Permissive use without modification, even in combined works ("MIT binaries"); but
- Copyleft with modification, including for the Affero "network hole", or commercial terms
could you suggest a clearer license option? AGPL triggers copyleft across combined works, LGPL doesn't cover the network hole, GPL has both problems. Their goals seem really reasonable, honestly, there should be a simple answer. It seems messy but I like it more than the SSPL/BSL/other neo-licenses.
I don't know anything more reasonable, but I would argue that this (isn't) reasonable precisely because it causes so much confusion due to the ambiguity and their refusal to clarify exactly what the terms really are.