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Comment by soenkeliebau | Hacker News Reader

>Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license.

I'm not sure I agree. Yes, standardization is a good thing and AGPL is the "known evil", but having read it I do think that it is a very very complex piece of text - personally I'd go so far as to say that it is close to incomprehensible and would prefer pretty much anything else.

But even aside from that the sheer number of companies that point blank ban AGPL licensed software from being used in their stack could be used as an indicator as well. Though this may be due to the common misunderstanding that it is a viral license, which just goes back to my prior point on it not being clearly worded.

I won't even mention alternatives, I'm sure they all have issues, it is a complex topic, but if it were up to me the AGPL would not be my first license choice.

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The question is whether the alternatives are any better; IMO, this is unlikely (all the others I've seen make tradeoffs that I'd consider poor, personally).

I think the virality and companies not liking it is the license working as intended, honestly; it's supposed to be viral, that's the point of copyleft, and obviously companies take issue with that (although I agree that some of this might be misunderstanding scope / what it infects), but that's not a bug, it's the license doing its job and companies making decisions based on that.

My personal opinion (and it is really just that - I cannot prove anything I say here) is that for a lot of those companies it is actually the risk of not being able to tell exactly what the AGPL would affect that is the main factor.

As I said, I'm explicitly not mentioning any alternative here because they all have issues, but the AGPL's wording is much more complicated than most and that (perceived) insecurity around it is my main criticism.

If companies want to ban AGPL, well that's their perogative.

Alternatively, catering to those companies wouldn't bring relevant benefits to the project anyway

Arguably selling support/services to a company using that product would help pay for developers that work on the product, which to me sounds like a benefit.

With the AGPL that would require dual licensing, and that draws flak as well.

I think the notion that OSS means there cannot be any money involved simply cannot hold true anymore these days. Software has become extremely complex and requires dedicated developers working on it - and they need to eat.

We are currently seeing a lot of companies changing their licensing model for a reason - because there is not currently a middle ground between OSS and a working business modell that the OSS crowd doesn't hate.

That being said, I'd love to be proven wrong here!

There are corps which have a (close to) blanket ban on AGPL, but still submit patches to open source projects. HP would be one of them.

I don't think it's a big loss though.

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