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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

The maintainer's leverage is severely diminished due to the fact MIT licensed versions of the software exist. Only new code will be copylefted so it will be easier to cut him out of the picture.

This is why developers should AGPLv3 their personal projects from day one. Then others can't fork it under another license.

Even if they choose AGPLv3, the creator still maintains full freedom since they own the copyrights. They can make a commercial version if they want to. They can even relicense it under favorable terms to companies for a licensing fee. Everyone else must abide by the copyleft rules.

If they don't like it, let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own developers to make their own in house proprietary version.

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> This is why developers should AGPLv3 their personal projects from day one.

That would be detrimental to "growth hacking" GitHub stars and gaining traction. One can't be paid without baiting users first.

There's gotta be a way to do this ethically, naturally and organically. I want people to engage with my projects too but I don't really want to sell my soul for it.

I hate advertising so I don't even post about my projects anywhere unless some very specific conditions are met. People found and shared my projects anyway. They've made it to the front page of HN. I even gained a GitHub sponsor because of that. Not enough to turn my hobby into full time work but still awesome.

Is there a free-for-corporate use under XX revenue or limited time license one can pack with an AGPLv3 project? Something that doesn't block people, even businesses, from using the project during the growth stage but also doesn't give away all your rights or ability to get paid later?

The copyright holder is free to grant use under any license they like to whoever they like.

It's rare but I've seen a number of projects over the years that have a hard copyleft license along with a line in the readme like "Want to use this with a different license? Send me an email and we'll sort it out"

> Even if they choose AGPLv3, the creator still maintains full freedom since they own the copyrights.

Only if they either refuse all contributions, require contributions to be made under an MIT license or similar (and then immediately relicense back to AGPLv3 before publishing), or require a CLA.

I'm all for personal projects to be licensed AGPLv3, but we must acknowledge that the moment you take others' AGPLv3 contributions, in practice you won't be able to do those other things.

Of course. The creator retains copyright. If there are multiple creators, things get complicated quickly. This is also why GNU projects ask that contributors assign copyright to the FSF. Gotta deal with this sort of bureaucracy before contributing is allowed.

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