Comment by skrtskrt
6 hours ago
In reality most $Evilcorp have policies against AGPLv3, which is why projects can make moneh selling a less-restricted enterprise license for the same code.
6 hours ago
In reality most $Evilcorp have policies against AGPLv3, which is why projects can make moneh selling a less-restricted enterprise license for the same code.
I often hear this but I don’t really understand it. Not saying you need to explain it to me but what is the issue with AGPLv3 that turns those corporations away?
To my non-lawyer eyes it looks like MIT or Apache2 but modifications need to be made public as well.
If you don’t make any modifications then it should be fine? Or do most $Evilcorp aim to make modifications? Or is AGPLv3 something like garlic against vampires (doesn’t make sense but seems to work)?
AGPLv3 includes that “distribution” includes essentially communicating with the service over the network, as opposed to the GPL concept of like, sending a shrink wrapped binary that someone downloads and runs themselves.
So basically they are worried that they have no way of avoiding one or more of their tens of thousands of engineers “distributing” it to customers by including it in some sort of publicly accessible service. AFAIK there’s no settled case regarding what level of network communication qualifies - like if I run a CRUD app on Postgres and Postgres was AGPL, am I distributing Postgres?
Now the second part is that you only have to give out your changes to the AGPL software to those that it was “distributed” to. Most people aren’t changing it! If anything they’re just running a control plane in front of it…
but it goes back to the corporate legal perspective of “better safe than sorry” - we can’t guarantee that one of our engineers, isn’t changing it in some way that would expose company internals, then triggering a condition where they have to distribute those private changes publicly.