Hacker News Reader

Truth or falsehoods aside, the reason one of the places I have worked (large 10's of k's of employees, big legal staff) refused to let us use AGPL is that it had never been decided in court, and they didn't want to be the ones to foot that bill.

"No" is pretty cheap, and they were pretty good at it.

View on HN

> "No" is pretty cheap

Now, is it really? Paying a team of software engineers to recreate every AGPL project surely isn't…

But using a non-AGPL project is a cheap and easy solution for just about every use-case out there. If there was something special that was AGPL licensed it might matter, but there isn't so it is easy to avoid.

Nobody is using every AGPL project and there aren't that many AGPL projects to begin with.

The problem is not just the risk associated with AGPL, it's also that the benefit is actually quite small. I think most companies would be a lot more willing to use AGPL, if there were any compelling projects using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com