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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

AGPL means you have to share any code you write using this framework. It makes no sense to me why a library would be AGPL licensed, LGPL is what I expect libraries to be, of course I'm not sure how the LGPL applies to Python, but I'm usually all in for MIT License.

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> It makes no sense to me why a library would be AGPL licensed

> AGPL means you have to share any code you write using this framework

I think you've found the reason?

But you're using this code in any application you make, so you can't use it commercially.. AGPL isn't made with libraries in mind...

> But you're using this code in any application you make, so you can't use it commercially.

AGPL puts no restrictions on commercial usage, as far as I am aware.

> AGPL isn't made with libraries in mind...

It works perfectly well with libraries.

I have always disliked the “GPL doesn’t prohibit commercial use” argument. You know well why it isn’t practical to use for commercial purposes. You basically make any project using it into an unlimited full featured free trial.

> I have always disliked the “GPL doesn’t prohibit commercial use” argument. You know well why it isn’t practical to use for commercial purposes. You basically make any project using it into an unlimited full featured free trial.

I don't get it. What would be so wrong about making your source code available to everyone (including your competitors)? Remember, if your source code is AGPL and someone uses it, their source code is also AGPL and they must make their changes available to their users.

If you deliver real value to your customers, the fact that your source code is publicly available should be a plus point for your customers.

It breaks the pay-per-copy model, which is realistically the only one that is viable for a lot of proprietary software.

How competitive would Google or Facebook be if all of their code were fully open sourced?

I don’t know about google or Facebook but I imagine I could argue the secret sauce is configuration which (I anal) I imagine is not something you’d have to release under any GPL. The threat isn’t so much that someone will build a competing google as much as I think it is someone will game our system. Just my guess.

If there were commercial restrictions then it wouldn't be a free software licence. You're free to use the software for any purpose.

And you are forced to give it away for free if asked to.

More importantly it means you have to share any modifications you make to the library itself. This is good for us. Sharing is good.

sharing forced by license is not good.

Why? It's worked pretty well so far. We wouldn't have free software at all without it.

There's plenty of open source projects that don't force the sharing of code and are still successful. I work for a company that works with open source projects and we do from time to time contribute fixes back to projects we depend on, it's not liable to maintain a fork that you have to maintain back ports for, especially as the main project gets reworked.

In this case, AGPL seems to be an open source veneer on a free during development license.

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