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Comment by StudentStuff | Hacker News Reader

I have found AGPLv3 useful, everything I do is under AGPLv3, if people want to use it under other terms, they can pay me for a branch under a mutually acceptable license. I will not maintain the alternatively licensed branch unless paid, and these branches after a few months are generally missing significant features.

Its a fine revenue stream for me, and in the context of what I am building and the companies that are using it, there is absolutely no reason to not use the AGPLv3 licensed master branch or releases, as I know they will never extend my software. Yet some people have an axe to grind with AGPLv3, to which I get to respond "Pay me money or fuck off". Seeing as none of them understand how to write software, they tend to pay me :P

Worst case someone extends one of my AGPLv3 projects, adding features and improving it. I'll accept a pull request with no CLA so long as the code is of decent quality.

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I'll accept a pull request with no CLA so long as the code is of decent quality.

If you accept contributions without a CLA, you are not the sole owner of the copyrights anymore and you cannot offer a proprietary paid branch, unless all contributors give you permission to relicense their AGPL code as proprietary.

Yep, and I'm perfectly fine with this. If someone wants a non-copyleft branch, they can pay me to rewrite the features I didn't author, otherwise I will exclude the added code from said pull request.

Its a definite edge case, but if I can get active contributors, I am not about to ask them to sign a CLA.

Keeping track of and excluding commits authored by others seems a lot of work. I am curious if you use any kind of tooling or process to make it easier.

Not yet, but I hope it becomes an issue. IMO its not bad issue to have.

A bigger issue might be trying to filter anything that might be derivative of contributed work not covered by CLA.

Yes, I am not sure how I will do that. I guess it can create enough FUD to scare away any commercial client.

MongoDB was AGPL, but according to MongoDB, Inc. that didn't stop cloud providers to sell it as service, without also publishing their management tools and everything else used to provision MongoDB under a license AGPL accepts. Hence MongoDB, Inc. came up with their license additions.

IANAL, but depending on who you ask, AGPL is deemed unenforcable or even misusing copyright legislation. In any case, AGPL hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, been tested before a (US or EU) court. If it had, I'd expect an excessive discussion as to which scope AGPL can have, and a fundamental legal discussion of whether copyright laws can even limit use of third-party software.

Anyway, AGPL doesn't directly address commercial licensing; it rather extends GPL's "distribution" to the case of "provisioning over a network", with the understanding that a commercial license also offered from the publishers doesn't require you to publish your source code to your end users. As it stands, AGPL might not be a good tool to express/enforce "free for personal use". It also depends on whether you actually want to win contributors, or merely have a licensing badge for your project. The AGPL itself basically implies that you want contributions (code) from your commercial users, rather than money.

The key difference is I do not care if companies use AGPLv3 software I have written. MongoDB predicated their business model on getting companies to license their code rather than use the AGPLv3 version of the codebase.

> IANAL, but depending on who you ask, AGPL is deemed unenforcable or even misusing copyright legislation.

No clue wrt AGPL (an old, crusty license), but GPLv3 was written with heavy involvement of the Software Freedom Law Center. The Affero paragraph (which is the only difference between AGPLv3 and GPLv3) was written by this same team at the same time.

As a non-lawyer, I would presume the lawyers that were tasked with reviewing the various forms of the third revision of GPL licenses did their job.

> Worst case someone extends one of my AGPLv3 projects, adding features and improving it. I'll accept a pull request with no CLA so long as the code is of decent quality.

Notice that it is perfectly fine to be "open source" without being "open development". Many free software projects do not actually accept pull requests as a matter of principle.

I've run into projects run like this, but I would love to get some driveby pull requests. Sadly the segment I work in has very few software developers, but lots of people who are (needlessly) scared of the licensing bogeyman.

> I've run into projects run like this, but I would love to get some driveby pull requests.

In that case, you canmake a driveby issue. This will be preferable for them and easier for you.

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