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There are software companies that make money on selling commercial licenses to libraries, but increase their visibility by offering AGPL-licensed versions on pu
by TimTheTinker 6y ago
There are software companies that make money on selling commercial licenses to libraries, but increase their visibility by offering AGPL-licensed versions on public package repos.
For example, PM2 is a dual-licensed (AGPL/commercial) NodeJS process manager available on npm.
I bet more than one SaaS company has had a significant problem to fix months or years after adding one of these libraries as a dependency in a project.
More reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21966864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21966864
- kemitchell 6y agoThe answer is "it depends". And mostly on the terms that AGPL shares with GPL.
- aflag 6y agoWhat do they do about external contributors? Do they agree on giving the copyright of any patches they make to the PM2 owners?
- xtracto 6y agoOne interesting case I find is ScyllaDB: They took the work of Cassandra (which is in a Permissive Apache License) and converted it into the less-permissive AGPL/Commercial. One of those things that are not "illegal" but kind of questionable.
- kmeisthax 6y agoIt's less questionable than incorporating permissively-licensed code into a proprietary product.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoThe problem with using a GPL/AGPL-licensed library is that legally, your code and the library together become a single derivative work. The LGPL explicitly exempts library consumers from any copyleft requirements in this scenario, but the GPL and AGPL arguably require the entire work to become licensed under GPL or AGPL, respectively -- and the AGPL in particular would require releasing the source code of the entire work to network consumers of the work.