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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

AGPL basically kills any commercial use of the code, which is where 95% of real breakthroughs happen.

The point of the AGPL is to prevent certain usage. If you want companies to consider paying you for an alternative license, the first step is choosing an Open Source license that they're not thrilled with.

If the author is the sole contributor or asks contributors for copyright assignments, then they can offer a paid license as well for "commercial use".

>commercial use of the code, which is where 95% of real breakthroughs happen.

I don't believe this at all. Data to back your statement?

AGPL basically kills any commercial use of the code

Yeah, that's right :)

That's the whole point after all, amirite?

What would happen to a commercial software breakthrough if it was licensed using AGPL?

Why are you asking it hypothetically? We have many examples of that. For example, Overleaf (the online LaTeX editor) is a service based on AGPL code for which my lab pays a significant amount of money each month.

Because I'm curious what the mindset behind "AGPL doesn't work for commercial environments" is.

It's a common, recurring statement and I'm sure people have good reasons to believe it. I can guess what that thinking might be, but there's no substitute for asking.

You have a list of AGPL-licensed software here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_under_the_GNU...

The list is not at all up to date, and very incomplete, but it's better than nothing. You can see that there's quite a few well-known infrastructure projects there.

> 95% of real breakthroughs happen

Is it? What hat are you pulling this number from?

You don't have to search for very long before you realize how much government-funded research and code has improved our life. Department of Energy labs, National Science Foundation, DARPA, Apollo Space Program, Human Genome Project and more are all publicly funded and responsible for some of the biggest "real breakthroughs" in human history, and that's just projects from the US.

Didn't you know that 87% of statistics are made up on the spot?

Actually, it's 97% - I think you're confusing it with the similar but unrelated quote by Abraham Lincoln: "85% of quotes on the internet are made up.".

Now I know you're making that up. The internet didn't even exist until Al Gore invented it!

I suspect there's not always a complete separation of "government-funded" vs "commercial" labels, especially in the case of things like Apollo and DARPA, where defence contractors essentially work as commercial companies on contracts for the US government / NASA, so it's not completely black and white in that area.

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook avoid touching AGPL software with a ten foot pole.

Choosing AGPL is a great way to isolate yourself from any collaboration with that community

Yes, that's exactly the point. I don't want those people around my codebase. Nobody on a Crusade to get you to adopt ProtoBuffers or Thrift. No codes of conduct. No risk of getting abandoned when priorities shift (like HHVM dropping support for PHP code). Heaven! I love software again :D

I don’t mean that kind of humanity-defining breakthroughs, but the kind that depend on OSS libraries - new social, entertainment, commerce and productivity tools that change our lives incrementally.

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