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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea and the use of AGPL. This license lets companies release useful software and still keep the door open for selling alternative licenses, if that is what Metabase does. I have been thinking of writing something similar for natural language access (similar to what I used in my first Java AI book fifteen years ago) to relational and RDF/OWL data stores, and Metabase provides a nice example of how to distribute a general purpose standalone query tool.

Also +1 for being a Clojure app. I am going on vacation tomorrow and am loading the code on my tiny travel laptop for reading.

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Perhaps, but many companies have a 'Abosolutely No AGPL' policy which effectively reduces adoption.

Those companies are missing out on some really great tools then, like this one. Perhaps as more and more awesome software is released as AGPL, they will change their position.

Of course, the way to say in compliance with those policies is for those companies to purchase licenses for the software.

That seems like a very silly policy. Do these companies do any kind of analysis on what they'd need from their software licenses and what they'd be giving up by using AGPL?

You'd think from their attitudes that the FSF is a patent troll.

Let's look at the advantages of using software under "permissive" licenses for those companies: - embedding somebody else's code in a closed source product and potentially compete against it - patenting somebody else's code and potentially sue the author

For the upstream author losing this type of hostile users my using AGPL might be a good idea.

It's not a silly policy. Using AGPL software (without getting a commercial license) in any modified form and/or depending on it would require all applications that use it across the network to be open sourced.

Of course this requires it to be modified which could happen accidentally and completely put a closed source application in jeopardy.

More info: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/107883/89740

That's why AGPL + Multi-licensing is so good idea.

If you have hangups against AGPL, you can pay money and get commercial license.

Thanks for the kind words!

Would love to hear what you think of the codebase.

More kind words:

This thing is badass.

One very selfish request: Google Bigquery connector.

I think a lot of the companies you'd like to serve are going to be folks who might start getting into large quantities of data, but are too small to have people to build out and maintain OLAP schemas. This, to me, is where BigQuery comes in.

If you don't mind, cast a vote in https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/1294

We're going to be building out connectors by community demand. =)

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