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Comment by figital | Hacker News Reader

They say "you can do whatever you want with it" ... but then license it under the AGPL. The name is funny but fleeting.

The AGPL won't allow others to do anything they want with it. A public domain license would. And a BSD/MIT license would be closer to a public domain license.

"public domain" is not a license.

It's still a legal creation that acts as a license.

Not in all jurisdictions. In some places, you can never abjure all of your rights (or responsibilities) as owner of intellectual property.

I'm curious, in which jurisdictions are you not able to generate IP that you choose not to own?

Germany.

so does this mean that nothing created in germany can be in the public domain in germany / europe?

Yes. You made it, you own it. (Until you explicitly transfer ownership to someone else.)

And then you still retain the moral right, or something like that.

In some countries.

I'm not sure that is correct - look at the web applications that use the AGPL license: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AGPL_web_applications

It seems to me this would allow the service provider approach and the ability to also have a commercial part (like the Funambol dual licensing approach...i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funambol). This doesn't seem like an overtly nefarious scheme to reach for your $5 :-)

They might dual-license it. It doesn't seem like they've put much thought into the design yet, maybe if you just email them they'll give you whatever license you want.

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