> It's designed to scare away open source hobby programmers? And users? Just giving my two cents: I don't have any trouble contributing to AGPL projects. Mind

> It's designed to scare away open source hobby programmers? And users? Just giving my two cents: I don't have any trouble contributing to AGPL projects. Mind you, I haven't contributed much in general, but still. As for using AGPL projects: Well, I wouldn't want to offer someone else's project as a service and poach potential users for the maintainers in the first place. But if I did, I wouldn't mind contributing back any modification I made. Now, using them as dependencies—for just one part of an application that you want to keep otherwise private—is a little trickier because I'm neither a lawyer nor has the AGPL been tested in court as far as I know. The crux of the issue lies on whether dynamic linking makes a piece of software derivative; the FSF thinks it does (at least from what I read in their FAQ), but that also hasn't been tested in court (again, AFAIK) and one's interpretation could be entirely different. If it isn't derivative, then there's no problem with using AGPL software strictly as dependency. And, if it is, well, in the world of microservices you could just create a thin wrapper over the AGPL library, run it as a service, and release only that. Then again, if one assumed that linking doesn't make a work derivative, then there's not much difference between the GPL and the LGPL (once again, AFAIK). It's a nuanced issue, to say the least.