3 ms·

AGPL is real show-stopper for serious adoption, IMO.

by vbit 11y ago

akbar501 11y ago
AGPL is used by a number of DBs such as MongoDB and Neo4j. I'm sure there are others, but these two are top of mind. RethinkDB's drivers are Apache or MIT (I can't remember which). Licensing the server as GPL/AGPL while making drivers Apache/MIT is an accepted practice in the database world as it provides the DB vendor with opportunities to protect revenue while the driver licenses protect developers from the GPL/AGPL.
- vbit 11y ago
  In spite of drivers being non AGPL, companies with 'absolutely no AGPL' policy cannot try the open source version of these DBs which puts these products behind others. I don't think AGPL provides any real benefit for the vendor. Most small organizations will want their patches (if any) to be upstreamed so they don't have the maintenance burden. Most big organizations will want commercial support anyway. All AGPL does is discourage adoption. There are plenty of non-AGPL DBs out there doing pretty well. Here are some examples of GPL/MIT/BSD style licensed DBs: Riak, Cassandra, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ArangoDB, CouchDB.
  - vpkaihla 11y ago
    > companies with 'absolutely no AGPL' policy cannot try the open source version of these DBs which puts these products behind others. Many companies have dumb policies. They are the ones that need to change.
    - vbit 11y ago
      Why is it a dumb policy?
v3ss0n 11y ago
But it acutally is. On the mailing list , a google employee wants to use RethinkDB but he is restricted due to AGPL. There was a good thread about it.
- v3ss0n 11y ago
  its here : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rethinkdb/g5UEck3sqMs https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rethinkdb/g5UEck3sqM...