3 ms·

Theres a small issue that you overlooked here which is that once it has contributions from several other people, anything AFPL becomes impossible to relicense,

Theres a small issue that you overlooked here which is that once it has contributions from several other people, anything AFPL becomes impossible to relicense, how do you get 6 random GitHub users to sign a contract, without robust copyright assignment/management mechanisms ahead of the very first outside contributor, AGPL effectively kills the ability for anyone too pay you for your own work on terms you might want to agree to. By using aggressive open source licenses like AGPLv3 you have to do more work to keep the door open for yourself to profit later if you so choose, it’s a bad personal economic choice, and while some view it as the ultimate in altruism to prevent this, it’s also an act of denial, everyone who could have used it inside companies or projects that can’t change their license to be compatible are denied the ability to use the code.

simfree 4y ago
Nothing says you have to accept outside contributions. Signal rewrites outside pull requests for this very reason. Also hot damn, the AFPL license is super aggressive, makes AGPLv3 look downright business friendly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Free_Public_License https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Free_Public_License
- LtWorf 4y ago
  > Signal rewrites outside pull requests for this very reason. Too bad that rewriting something doesn't transfer copyright :D
  - leaflets2 4y ago
    Might mean to reimplement from scratch without looking at the would-have-been contributed code. Ideas aren't copyrightable. IANAL
LtWorf 4y ago
Eh I've just put a contributing file where to contribute you must accept the software might go under lgpl and future versions of gpl/lgpl might be adopted. That's it. I have no plans for using anything more liberal than lgpl ever.