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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

Just curious about AGPL. Do you feel that AGPL gives you a hedge against a cloud service deploying your project at scale for profit that the project would otherwise miss out on?

I ask this as someone who has been sitting on some code for 10 years for precisely this reason!

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To some extent yes. It's not 100% protection. AGPL is just the right model, closes the loophole that GPL left. If you get to change the code, you must contribute the changes back. That's all

AGPL is viral as well. Many companies believe client libraries will also fall into AGPL scope, and therefor any apps using these clients will also have to be AGPL licensed.

So many companies ban AGPL completely.

A: The "one additional feature" - Section 2(d) reads as follows: " If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work."

"This enables the original author... to download the source and receive the benefit of any modifications to its original work.

So if a cloud vendor (or anyone) decided to take your software and use it, if they made modifications to it you are entitled to get access to those modifications. For many people this is a barrier to entry -- they want the ability to modify it in however they want (which they can still do privately under AGPL). But if they offer it in public, they have to share their mods back to the community.

At least, that is my layperson's understanding of it. I am not an intellectual property lawyer and do not pretend to be.

Source: http://www.affero.org/oagf.html

The quoted language is from the long-extinct AGPLv1, which was published in the early 2000s and adopted by only a handful of projects.

Ah! Good catch. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer. :)

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