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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

No, companies are not happy to discuss, modify, and sign new contracts every day. They are quite hesitant to. At Matasano, it became our practice simply to tell new clients we'd be happy to sign their paper and not ours, because we'd lose weeks just to get to the point where their legal would consider looking at our contracts. At my last company, we non-negotiably used our own contracts, and budgeted a month to legal review for every signup. New contracts are a big deal.

And, what's more, the contracts we're talking about are all basically pro-forma. They're nothing like the AGPL, which has, in reasonable interpretations, far-reaching impact on IP across the whole company.

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> No, companies are not happy to discuss, modify, and sign new contracts every day. They are quite hesitant to.

[citation needed]

> And, what's more, the contracts we're talking about are all basically pro-forma.

I had very custom employment contracts with 2 well-known large tech companies. When asking to remove some clauses and add new ones they did not flinch at the ask and let me have meetings with their lawyers.

I have many other examples but a quick search on the internet can show how many contract-related discussions happen between large companies, suppliers, local governments & so on

Matasano is not the size of a FAANG and similar or maybe it has a small legal team by choice.

The authors of AGPL packages are also not the size of a FAANG! That's the point! If they were, they wouldn't be negotiating AGPL with Google; they'd be negotiating an actual contract.

(I have zero problem with AGPL and happily use it myself for things, but I use it the same way I feel most of my peers use it, as an explicit "no, FAANG, you can't use this code, pay me instead" marker.)

>If they were, they wouldn't be negotiating AGPL with Google; they'd be negotiating an actual contract.

This would stop being true if (and when) FAANG figured out how to effectively use AGPL internally. In my opinion, this is inevitable as long as software continues to be published under this license. From their perspective it seems they don't even have to do anything besides wait for other smaller companies to get in legal disputes and set a precedent. Or better yet, wait for a potential acquisition to come along that happens to have won one of these disputes.

If you're trying to pivot this to a place where I'll concede that AGPL is a good thing, you're wasting energy, because I already think AGPL is a good thing. I'm not making this point about contracts because I'm motivated to talk down AGPL; I'm doing it because, in my experience over the last 15 years, it has definitely not been the case that companies are comfortable entering into arbitrary contracts. It's just not true.

Precisely. Also the negotiation takes a long time and usually the risk is not as high as agpl, since these contracts dont have clauses like 'all your ip is mine'(except one player here known to try to sneak such a clause in every time).

From doing many sales negotiations with companies, my experience has been nobody is _happy_ to modify their contracts. Full stop. They can be convinced to do so if you've got appropriate leverage, but time with lawyers is expensive, and hard to automate (currently). Employment contract changes are not the same as commercial contracts, nor the same as IP arrangements.

>I have many other examples but a quick search on the internet can show how many contract-related discussions happen between large companies, suppliers, local governments & so on

It would be surprising if these negotiations were accomplished within a small number of months. I am a small company (smaller than Matasano) and have had my contract accepted, but it is a non-trivial effort. There will certainly be items that come back, then they go to my lawyer followed by more discussion.

In the past, I did a contract negotiation with a very large (non FAANG) company and it took months, and required me to recruit internal advocates for my position.

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