I really struggle with AGPL however.
I really struggle with AGPL however.
What's your problem with the AGPL? I'm pretty neutral on it myself, I havn't used it for my own projects but it seems like an ok license to have around for people who don't want their code used in locked up SaaS.
I'm ok with dual licensing, what annoys me is businesses that makes nominally free software but puts half the core functionality in proprietary extensions. It feels like they're saying, we want the community to contribute to our core, but we're going to sell the profitable parts.
Even worse is a company like Odoo (not to name anyone...), who switched from all AGPL + selling support model to a free core + proprietary modules model. They relicensed their codebase, claiming they own copyright for all of it since they rewrote all community-contributed parts, but that's really questionable. You can't erase 10 years of community contributions.
It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect a company to open source everything it creates; there are legitimate competitive advantages to keeping that software to yourself. It is much easier to convince companies to share their non-core software, and companies will actually gain from doing this.
Kudos to you.
The reason I dislike AGPL is the confusion around it (I think I have seen it interpreted as both 1. Same as GPL only for web apps and 2. You must buy an exception or everything that ever communicates with it is also AGPL.)
edit: I just looked it up on the GNU site. > However, some companies that develop and rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement
So much for user freedom being #1.
At work some clients don't want the extra burden of the network distribution clause, when that's the case we don't use AGPL code; but that's precisely the point - the authors don't want them to be able to use the code on their server without sharing.