Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarofgreen | Hacker News Reader

Hello, can you confirm exactly what you are doing here? If it's AGPL with no CLA or anything, how are you doing "They can purchase a commercial license to remove the copyleft restrictions"?

EDIT: Asking because I'm genuinely interested in this issue and am currently making license choices myself - not trying to have a go!

View on HN

For now we just changed to AGPL as a defensive move to avoid these threats. It was an unplanned move that we didn't even think about few days ago.

Next step is really to consider what we want to do in the future and if necessary add a CLA before we merge next contribution.

We never planned to do any commercial licenses (we're focused on our Cloud offering) but it seems like a valid option in case of these corporations who want to resell our product but not open source their modifications.

I see.

I would definitely urge you to consider this very soon: AFAIK you can't do any commercial licenses with AGPL without A) some form of dual license and CLA or B) just never accepting pull requests from anyone.

But also, does this also apply to your own cloud hosted offering? Without sorting this out, all the software in your cloud hosting product now has to be fully open-source. And I get that's your philosophy, but would there not be any tiny bit you want to keep closed - maybe the anti-fraud stuff around your billing system, for instance?

This seems a key point that I'm very interested in, so sorry for pushing!

AGPL doesn't work the way you think it does. An anti-fraud system service can easily communicate with Plausible over a network connection through an IPC interchange (HTTP, gRPC, etc.) without triggering that issue. The extension to Plausible to support that itself would be AGPL, but the anti-fraud service itself would not have to be.

Yes - I was thinking of internal code, not an external service. But yeah, knowledge of what would or would not be covered by AGPL seems crucial here.

You'd probably want to be able to communicate with multiple anti-fraud systems anyway, so I would expect it to be something plugged into Plausible and not part of Plausible itself.

Hello markosaric, Have you thought on requiring contributions to be dual licensed MIT + AGPL? This would avoid you the need of a CLA because you can use MIT to incorporate the contribution to your cloud solution and/or to sell a license to a corporation that would like to keep their modifications closed. This would also lower the barrier to contributors due they don't need to sign the CLA.

This is an insightful comment about how to achieve certain uses without CLAs, nice to learn about this.

thanks! that's a good point and makes sense to do!

Do you have any examples of projects doing this? Thanks!

> how are you doing "They can purchase a commercial license to remove the copyleft restrictions"?

This is incorrect. If you own copyright on something you can transfer those rights to other people in any way you want.

I can give you a copy of my software under AGPL and another copy under a completely different license and the two things are independent from each other.

There isn't a "remove the copyleft restrictions" mechanism.

You can simply give out a new copy with a closed license that allows, for example, execution as a service, static linking, dynamic linking but no copy.

The problem is contributions by others, of course.

Right, but if you accept outside contributions, and those contributors give you their changes under the AGPL as well, you cannot relicense their work under terms other than the AGPL.

You can get around this by requiring copyright assignment from all contributors, or by making contributors sign an agreement that allows you to do what you want to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com