> If big companies don't want to play the game for whatever legal reasons, that's on them. And... so there is the commercial license (even if I'm pretty sure I'

> If big companies don't want to play the game for whatever legal reasons, that's on them. And... so there is the commercial license (even if I'm pretty sure I'll never sell a single one for Vulcain). If they really want to use it, they can pay (they pay for AWS, Windows, Sales Force... and a lot of other proprietary software after all). If I were looking at using this, it's somewhat of a show-stopper for me not because I think that my company wouldn't want to pay for it; it's that the procurement process is so painful that it becomes almost not worth it for the limited scope of use. I think a lot of people miss one of AWS' greatest selling points: I go through procurement once to get authorized to use AWS, and it then opens up a whole cache of services I can utilize. Things with a wide range of functionality are worth fighting with procurement over; things that implement a single function start to kick in cost-benefit questions over whether I can get by with the functionality provided by MIT or Apache licensed projects, or if I can re-implement the portions I'm interested in. > In the case of Vulcain, the protocol is what has most value (IMHO), and it is not licensed under AGPL. I shudder at the thought of trying to convince legal of this. That may be your interpretation or goal, but Legal is likely going to take the broadest possible interpretation of the licensing. I'm not a lawyer, I have no context to discuss who's right here, but my experiences with legal have been to always assume that they will take an extremely conservative approach (as is their job). That being said, Mongo does do the same thing, and the surrounding discussions seem to agree that using Mongo's API does not make your software a derived work. The AGPL introduces a risk that someone, maybe an intern or someone 3 years later who doesn't know the licensing context around the AGPL software, will do something that makes internal applications a derived work. Even denoting what makes something a "derived work" gets into murky territory that, afaik, has not entirely been legally tested in court. It has far less to do with being unwilling to contribute the changes back to upstream, and more to do with a fear of the risk that someone will accidentally violate the segregation between our applications and the AGPL'ed one, and suddenly all of our proprietary code is under the AGPL because one application violated that boundary. Which is legitimate fear if your codebases are tightly coupled (i.e. this app used Vulcan as a library, and that app links to this library that almost all of our applications use, so now it's all under the AGPL). The problem is not contributing changes to Vulcan upstream, it's the risk of the license infecting proprietary software. This is super cool, and I am definitely going to dig into this for personal projects. I really appreciate the work you put in, and you open sourcing this. The licensing is entirely up to you, and I'm going to poke around in it either way; but it is a killer for trying to use it in enterprise-y environments.