4 ms·

That is why some choose to license their work under AGPL.

psykovsky 11y ago
And that's why some stay away from AGPL licensed projects.
istvan__ 11y ago
If you work for a bigger organization these licenses are banned for a good reason. There are some companies who are a little bit too relaxed with this ban (like VMWare) and you can see the results. I know for fact that some of the big guys take licensing very seriously and there are licenses that are approved for use while others are banned. The want to make sure there is no surprise down the road.
cwyers 11y ago
That still only goes so far, though. If you're building a product on top of a database that's licensed with the AGPL, like Mongo, you have to distribute those changes.* If you build your Intranet site on Mongo, though, you don't need to distribute those changes in a way that gets back to upstream. * I think. And I don't know if this has withstood the sort of court scrutiny the GPL has.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  For the intranet site, I think you'd still need to make the source code available to users, who could then make the source publicly available. IANAL, though, so I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    >I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL Section 10 of both the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 prevent the imposition of "further restrictions" on the subject of the license.
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      I'm aware. What's not clear is whether applies to the individual components of an organization (i.e. its employees) or just the organization as a whole. I want to think the answer is that intra-organizational distribution still counts as distribution (and therefore cannot be restricted), but usually it's considered acceptable to use a modified version of (A)GPL'd software internally (i.e. not used outside the organization) without it counting as "distribution", so things are kind of fuzzy without explicit terms in that regard. Such are the side-effects of treating organizations as singular entities :)
- reitanqild 11y ago
  As far as I know mongo think they have solved this by providing dricers under a different licence. Again, AFAIK, this licencing (AGPL + MIT/BSD or Apache) has not been tested in court.
hobarrera 11y ago
And that would make no change for things like OSs. If OpenBSD was AGPL and my ISP used it on all its network hardware with some custom modification, they still wouldn't be forced to contribute back those changes. We need to stop making licences that attempt to force people to do the right thing, and start educating people to do the write thing out of free will.

And that's why some stay away from AGPL licensed projects.

If you work for a bigger organization these licenses are banned for a good reason. There are some companies who are a little bit too relaxed with this ban (like VMWare) and you can see the results. I know for fact that some of the big guys take licensing very seriously and there are licenses that are approved for use while others are banned. The want to make sure there is no surprise down the road.

cwyers 11y ago

That still only goes so far, though. If you're building a product on top of a database that's licensed with the AGPL, like Mongo, you have to distribute those changes.* If you build your Intranet site on Mongo, though, you don't need to distribute those changes in a way that gets back to upstream. * I think. And I don't know if this has withstood the sort of court scrutiny the GPL has.

yellowapple 11y ago
For the intranet site, I think you'd still need to make the source code available to users, who could then make the source publicly available. IANAL, though, so I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL.
- dublinben 11y ago
  >I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL Section 10 of both the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 prevent the imposition of "further restrictions" on the subject of the license.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    I'm aware. What's not clear is whether applies to the individual components of an organization (i.e. its employees) or just the organization as a whole. I want to think the answer is that intra-organizational distribution still counts as distribution (and therefore cannot be restricted), but usually it's considered acceptable to use a modified version of (A)GPL'd software internally (i.e. not used outside the organization) without it counting as "distribution", so things are kind of fuzzy without explicit terms in that regard. Such are the side-effects of treating organizations as singular entities :)
reitanqild 11y ago
As far as I know mongo think they have solved this by providing dricers under a different licence. Again, AFAIK, this licencing (AGPL + MIT/BSD or Apache) has not been tested in court.

hobarrera 11y ago

And that would make no change for things like OSs. If OpenBSD was AGPL and my ISP used it on all its network hardware with some custom modification, they still wouldn't be forced to contribute back those changes. We need to stop making licences that attempt to force people to do the right thing, and start educating people to do the write thing out of free will.