The future of free and open source is AGPL | Hacker News Reader

The future of free and open source is AGPL

vadosware.io

Good writeup. Most of my projects are Apache 2 licensed because they are examples for my programming books. If not for that, AGPL would be my favorite default license. I also think LGPL is really great to nudge users to share improvements to libraries they use.

I wish there was also a publicly accepted ALGPL (writing it now is derided as license proliferation).

Appreciate it!

One thing that got brought up on reddit was public domain -- what do you think about that? If you had to rank them (AGPL/LGPL/public domain) how would they be laid out in your mind?

AGPL is feared and blocked where I work. The CI pipeline flags it like it's a virus.

Do you see a possible future where people get over this? A few big companies start to introduce/run AGPL code and then the gates open?

I don’t see this changing until after several lawsuits are appealed to various courts and so on. The AGPL is a very proscriptive license and it’s legal implications are wider than any other open source license. Naturally legal team caution tends towards risk reduction and eliminating AGPL is an effective risk reduction from a customer sue the business over <unknown software component> source access type of risks.

So yeah I don’t see it changing without several expensive lawsuits being pursued by someone willing to use the AGPL and trying to die on that hill of not giving away the code. Between people using the AGPL tending to be aware of this and not wanting to violate the licensing the potential pool of people that might even wind up in the position to be served with such a lawsuit is small and the number willing to die on that hill in order to appeal it high enough to set legal precedent is vanishingly small.

It’s sort of a Drake equation situation… number of license users, number of users of the license users, value involved in the licensing, cost of lawsuits, willingness to defend, etc…

I can’t for the life of me ever imagine putting any software licensed AGPL in anything that is client facing or customer facing. _Maybe_ as something that manages data for other software (e.g., an AGPL alternative to POEditor). _Maybe_ if it’s something that we run 100% as something that can just be used and doesn’t require any software development on our part.

> _Maybe_ if it’s something that we run 100% as something that can just be used and doesn’t require any software development on our part.

And that's what I'm counting on towards the end. I think that once a few companies take on the risk here and maybe use software they don't modify (or hire open source devs/evangelists/etc), it will make it a bunch easier for others to as well.

Yeah. I don’t think it will happen. IME, the aesthetics of AGPLed software tends to be stuck satisfying the same people who think that MOTIF was the pinnacle of GUI interface design.

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