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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > very copyleft and not compatible with business models.

Could you explain this for the rest of us? Thanks.

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The short answer is that it means that businesses need to publicly share whatever change they do to the code, and that alone is enough deterrent to use it.

"The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

This means that if this company is successful and sells me 1 license, in theory I can request the source code and spin up Dr Evil's voice 1 billion clones and not pay licenses for those.

With other forms of GPL you only have to release the source code if you release the software to the user.

A business that maintain its customer base captive through any kind of designed technical defect and asymmetrical information distribution is not striving for excellence in customer experience.

Saying that such a behavior encompasses all possible business models, it's like saying directorship is the only form of governance.

Name 3 succesful companies running under such restrictions?

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