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We do not choose AGPL so we would not harm our users. Lets not confuse the means and the goal here. AGPL is copyleft and restricting. Fair users refuse using it

We do not choose AGPL so we would not harm our users. Lets not confuse the means and the goal here. AGPL is copyleft and restricting. Fair users refuse using it. OSI does not help technological companies to find a fair solution and force us to go outside of "OSS".

riquito 4y ago
I don't want to enter in the merit of your company's choice, it's definitely up to you what license to use, but I'm confused about that statement around AGPL. How would AGPL harm users?
- bpicolo 4y ago
  The lawyers often ban AGPL at tech cos
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    Which means they may pay for an alternative to the AGPL.
    - blackoil 4y ago
      More likely they'll ignore the s/w. Huge amount of talent is working in such companies. Using AGPL will practically exclude them from interacting with the s/w. Also, smaller companies like to play safe. If FAANG with their million lawyers aren't touching it, why should I take the risk.
      - true_religion 4y ago
        Because unlike FAANG you don’t have millions of engineers to create the software from scratch. Companies pay for databases (Oracle, Gemstone, MsSQL, anything at Amazon). Almost all the risks (price changes, maintenance costs, etc.) can be managed adequately via a long term enterprise contract.
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    Yes, we’re going through this right now
- romange 4y ago
  By preventing them from using dragonfly. Many companies prohibit from dev teams(aka our users) from downloading and using agpl licensed software.
arinlen 4y ago
> We do not choose AGPL so we would not harm our users. This is a first. If anything, it seems clear that a FLOSS license such as AGPL achieves exactly the opposite: is highly protective of the users' best interests, both in the short term and long term. Could you elaborate on why do you think that users are harmed by standard, run-of-the-mill FLOSS licenses?
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Depends on who you consider 'the users'. If you are a 'user' in the sense of an individual working on their own stuff, then yes, AGPL protects you a lot. However, if you are a 'user' in the sense of a company wanting to make software to sell as a service, it doesn't protect you very much, and can make you vulnerable.
  - leonidasv 4y ago
    How does AGPL can make a company trying to sell a software* as service vulnerable? *Assuming it's not a memory-store as a service, obviously.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      I don’t know, but I do know my legal department says we can’t use it, and I have heard the same about many other companies.
      - adastra22 4y ago
        Most legal departments don't allow for copyleft licenses. This is because most legal departments don't actually make their own legal determinations but instead rely on industry norms. And google set the stage here ages ago with their no-GPL (and especially, no-AGPL) policy. However this is rather uniquely due to Google's monorepo infrastructure. Google quite literally has all its products in the same source code repository, being built and statically linked together to create a single system binary (or so I am told--I've never worked there). In this case AGPL would virally infect the rest of your code and you could find yourself in trouble. Even if they don't, they might get hit with a discovery request for the source code of some project to prove compliance, and in the process have to provide their entire monorepo and all its business secrets to the court. Etc. Etc. But these are concerns which stem directly from Google's monorepo architecture. It's not generally true of the whole industry. And yet Google's fear of copyleft--rational though it may be in their particular instance--has been copied throughout the entire industry. 99% of the companies out there have nothing to fear from the AGPL. But hey, if you're some random in-house lawyer at company XYZ, who are you to question Google's legal precedent?
ryan_lane 4y ago
Using a non-OSI approved license hurts your users considerably more than AGPL (and this is coming from someone who generally doesn't like the AGPL). Legal teams are far less likely to approve licenses like the one you've chosen, than AGPL. I could convince a legal team to allow an AGPL service, depending on how we were using it. It would be difficult to get them to allow us to use this license, and I definitely couldn't convince them to allow us to contribute to software using this license. Effectively, you've ensured you won't have a community, because in reality the project is closed source, and dead if your company dies, which means it's not an option for me to consider.
- romange 4y ago
  I do not have any practical, first hand experience with either license. Re -agpl, i know for a fact that it is banned in corporations. We choose BSL to avoid this. Say if a team in amazon would want to use DF internally they could. I know for a fact that AGPL is a big no there. If we are mistaken and BSL is also banned then we will need to see what to do. I hope people will understand the reason behind bsl. I hope people will see apache there and will help us to grow. Based on HN comments some already do.
  - derfabianpeter 4y ago
    As someone building software for a living I fully agree with your decision to not go full OSS. It’s always a hefty discussion but I feel most of the people only exist on the receiving end of software and do not have to worry how a license impacts real life distribution. Big corp (I’m from Germany) DOES hesitate to go with any form of non-Apache-2 licensed OSS software. In Germany often times OSS is even discouraged if there’s no commercial support for it. I understand the emotions people have regarding licenses that do allow them to work with software as they please - but I also think it’s useless to argue around licensing of a software instead of focusing on the good it can do. Something being proprietary has NO impact on your choice to buy it when outside of the software world. Why does it here?
    - rglullis 4y ago
josephcsible 4y ago
If that's your only concern, then why not dual license? Give your users the choice whether they want to follow the current license or the AGPL.
- romange 4y ago
  We may do it in the future. We will see if the community will accept Dragonfly with BSL. MariaDb were pretty famous and i do not remember any loud objections to their license.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    There were a lot of loud objections to their license, and remember that MariaDB the database isn't licensed that way (it's GPL), just the much less used MaxScale and CMAPI.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    I was quite excited to see Dragonfly. However now that the license has been pointed out, I won't be touching it with a 10 foot pole. I wish you the best of luck, but I'll never use it. If it was AGPL I'd have been a happy camper though.

riquito 4y ago

I don't want to enter in the merit of your company's choice, it's definitely up to you what license to use, but I'm confused about that statement around AGPL. How would AGPL harm users?

bpicolo 4y ago
The lawyers often ban AGPL at tech cos
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  Which means they may pay for an alternative to the AGPL.
  - blackoil 4y ago
    More likely they'll ignore the s/w. Huge amount of talent is working in such companies. Using AGPL will practically exclude them from interacting with the s/w. Also, smaller companies like to play safe. If FAANG with their million lawyers aren't touching it, why should I take the risk.
    - true_religion 4y ago
      Because unlike FAANG you don’t have millions of engineers to create the software from scratch. Companies pay for databases (Oracle, Gemstone, MsSQL, anything at Amazon). Almost all the risks (price changes, maintenance costs, etc.) can be managed adequately via a long term enterprise contract.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  Yes, we’re going through this right now
romange 4y ago
By preventing them from using dragonfly. Many companies prohibit from dev teams(aka our users) from downloading and using agpl licensed software.

arinlen 4y ago

> We do not choose AGPL so we would not harm our users. This is a first. If anything, it seems clear that a FLOSS license such as AGPL achieves exactly the opposite: is highly protective of the users' best interests, both in the short term and long term. Could you elaborate on why do you think that users are harmed by standard, run-of-the-mill FLOSS licenses?

cortesoft 4y ago
Depends on who you consider 'the users'. If you are a 'user' in the sense of an individual working on their own stuff, then yes, AGPL protects you a lot. However, if you are a 'user' in the sense of a company wanting to make software to sell as a service, it doesn't protect you very much, and can make you vulnerable.
- leonidasv 4y ago
  How does AGPL can make a company trying to sell a software* as service vulnerable? *Assuming it's not a memory-store as a service, obviously.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    I don’t know, but I do know my legal department says we can’t use it, and I have heard the same about many other companies.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Most legal departments don't allow for copyleft licenses. This is because most legal departments don't actually make their own legal determinations but instead rely on industry norms. And google set the stage here ages ago with their no-GPL (and especially, no-AGPL) policy. However this is rather uniquely due to Google's monorepo infrastructure. Google quite literally has all its products in the same source code repository, being built and statically linked together to create a single system binary (or so I am told--I've never worked there). In this case AGPL would virally infect the rest of your code and you could find yourself in trouble. Even if they don't, they might get hit with a discovery request for the source code of some project to prove compliance, and in the process have to provide their entire monorepo and all its business secrets to the court. Etc. Etc. But these are concerns which stem directly from Google's monorepo architecture. It's not generally true of the whole industry. And yet Google's fear of copyleft--rational though it may be in their particular instance--has been copied throughout the entire industry. 99% of the companies out there have nothing to fear from the AGPL. But hey, if you're some random in-house lawyer at company XYZ, who are you to question Google's legal precedent?

ryan_lane 4y ago

Using a non-OSI approved license hurts your users considerably more than AGPL (and this is coming from someone who generally doesn't like the AGPL). Legal teams are far less likely to approve licenses like the one you've chosen, than AGPL. I could convince a legal team to allow an AGPL service, depending on how we were using it. It would be difficult to get them to allow us to use this license, and I definitely couldn't convince them to allow us to contribute to software using this license. Effectively, you've ensured you won't have a community, because in reality the project is closed source, and dead if your company dies, which means it's not an option for me to consider.

romange 4y ago
I do not have any practical, first hand experience with either license. Re -agpl, i know for a fact that it is banned in corporations. We choose BSL to avoid this. Say if a team in amazon would want to use DF internally they could. I know for a fact that AGPL is a big no there. If we are mistaken and BSL is also banned then we will need to see what to do. I hope people will understand the reason behind bsl. I hope people will see apache there and will help us to grow. Based on HN comments some already do.
- derfabianpeter 4y ago
  As someone building software for a living I fully agree with your decision to not go full OSS. It’s always a hefty discussion but I feel most of the people only exist on the receiving end of software and do not have to worry how a license impacts real life distribution. Big corp (I’m from Germany) DOES hesitate to go with any form of non-Apache-2 licensed OSS software. In Germany often times OSS is even discouraged if there’s no commercial support for it. I understand the emotions people have regarding licenses that do allow them to work with software as they please - but I also think it’s useless to argue around licensing of a software instead of focusing on the good it can do. Something being proprietary has NO impact on your choice to buy it when outside of the software world. Why does it here?
  - rglullis 4y ago

josephcsible 4y ago

If that's your only concern, then why not dual license? Give your users the choice whether they want to follow the current license or the AGPL.

romange 4y ago
We may do it in the future. We will see if the community will accept Dragonfly with BSL. MariaDb were pretty famous and i do not remember any loud objections to their license.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  There were a lot of loud objections to their license, and remember that MariaDB the database isn't licensed that way (it's GPL), just the much less used MaxScale and CMAPI.
- adastra22 4y ago
  I was quite excited to see Dragonfly. However now that the license has been pointed out, I won't be touching it with a 10 foot pole. I wish you the best of luck, but I'll never use it. If it was AGPL I'd have been a happy camper though.