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Comment by adambrenecki | Hacker News Reader

> Dramatiq is licensed under the AGPL and it officially supports Python 3.6 and later. Commercial Licensing is also available.

Oh.

> I’ve done a ton of open source work over the course of my career. Companies have used that work to generate income for themselves. Inevitably, I’ve ended up supporting that software on those companies’ behalf for free and that is not sustainable long term.

This is totally 100% true and understandable. Unfortunately, a lot of devs are going to go "hmm, I could battle to convince someone that can approve purchases that it's worth forking out $2k/year for this, or I could just use Celery".

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Came here to comment on AGPL. We use Celery a lot. Sometimes for really small projects. Sometimes for Fortune 500 companies. Either way, AGPL isn't an option and managing commercial licensing on something like this for each customer is a huge pain. Despite my technical interest in the project, I can't really get past the licensing. It's a non-starter for me.

I hope it works out for the author. If not, maybe there are other revenue generation options that could be paired with a less restrictive license.

Hopefully more developers stop giving their work away for free so that this attitude can change.

I am curious how the landscape of software development would change if everyone followed suit. I am not sure the effect would be a net positive. $2000 per year is inconvenient. $2000 per year for each and every one of the 20 open source projects you use will be prohibitively expensive. Companies would start writing more of their codes in house instead of using commercial open source software. There would be way fewer freelancers and small software shops as the upfront cost will be enormous. Imagine if you had to pay $10,000 up front to start developing a small commercial Django project (e.g. Django, DRF, Dramatiq, Postgres, Redis).

It will be OK if the commercial option only applied to large organizations. But with the current setup, it just makes Dramatiq unreachable for the small players.

I don't think so. If you were willing to hire a team to implement some solution that existed in OSS form, why wouldn't you just pay for the OSS version, which would likely be cheaper (since you're spreading the price across many different companies). This is already the appeal of OSS - it's cheap, other people build and use it so it's well tested, etc. Those are significant benefits, and worth paying for over an in-house team.

And we already have pricing models for small/medium sized businesses vs large ones. OSS could easily have similar models.

2k USD is somewhere between a man-week and a man-month. Hiring a developer to just reimplement existing solution is prohibitively expensive.

The idea is not that everyone would implement the entire functionality of every library they would otherwise use. With big libraries, each user may need 5% of the functionality. But not the same 5%. If the options were paying thousands of dollars or implementing your own, in many cases the latter would make sense. Definitely not in all cases, I admit.

The way I think about it is what if the only database solution was Oracle. I'm sure many would have wrote their own limited buggy DBMS or used flat files instead. It will certainly be more expensive to write your own Oracle RDBMS from scratch instead of paying for the licence. But you don't need most of the features and for the ones you need, the price point does not make sense for all projects. For some projects, flat files or JSON files saved somewhere on the disk wouldn't sound so bad.

Yep, that's understandable. If someone makes a cost-benefit analysis and decides that they prefer the cheaper option then that's perfectly fine with me, I'll still be here a year later when they realize their mistake. ;)

That said, I do give out commercial licenses for free for companies that are just starting out. My goal with this is not to get rich, it's just to get people to contribute something back in whatever way they can.

I approve the share and share back spirit. AGPL for a library means that the application that uses it must be licensed under the AGPL too, right?

It's a little more nuanced[0] than that and I confess I don't fully understand it myself. IANAL, but my understanding is it depends on how it's used. If a user action on your website ends up triggering Dramatiq code then you have to open source that code in addition to providing access to Dramatiq. If all you do is batch processing on your own servers, then you don't have to do anything; you're merely a user of the software.

[0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5004

Is asynchronous interaction still "interaction" for the purposes of the AGPL? If End User A's manual changes are placed into a database or file which is read by Dramatiq code in a subsequent cron-triggered batch process, is that considered interaction? These questions are not at all cut and dry, but companies like MongoDB who use the AGPL could conceivably argue that this would be considered an interaction. [I am not a lawyer.]

As a separate point, it's odd that anyone would use a license that they "don't fully understand," when (presumably) they would hold themselves to a higher standard of understanding the behavior of libraries they uses in their software itself. Is it irrational to consider this, at the very least, an indication of lack of attention to detail, and a tremendous red flag?

I am not a copyright lawyer so when I say I don't fully understand the implications of a particular license that's all I mean. I would say exactly the same of thing of other licenses I've used such as the 3-Clause BSD License, the Apache License and the MIT License. I understand what they're for and broadly how they may be applied, but I don't understand all the intricacies and interactions they have with copyright law because it's not something I have deeply studied. Hope that makes sense!

I'm sorry about your decision. AGPL is not a way to make corporations pay for your code. It's a way to make corporations stay the hell away from your code. This may be a legitimate goal, but apparently not in your case.

Due to the viral nature of AGPL, they have hard time trying your code to decide if it is worth using. Due to copyright assignment and patent clauses, they have very hard time contributing anything back.

What more or less works is GPL + commercial license, the freemium model. You need to get enough free users on your bandwagon to show corporate users that the code is worth trying, and maybe paying for. You need to get corporations hire you to provide support and develop special features they need in the paid tier.

Not that this problem is completely solved, but likely you heard about e.g. MySQL or Nginx who use the freemium model.

I've always been kind of unclear on how the AGPL works, even after reading various TL;DR-ish explainers. What happens if you link/import AGPL code in, vs running an AGPL service as a separate process as part of your architecture?

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