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Comment by nnx | Hacker News Reader

Is there any uptake in AGPL use? Besides perhaps the initial spike near AGPL creation, any popular opensource library using AGPL since?

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There is a recent uptake in companies who want to make sure that their software isn't 'resold' by hosting companies (or book shops). They license the software under AGPL, so it's still "free", and can be used by individuals (or carefully by companies), but also have a commercial license available. You can't make "Hosted $THING" without a partnership.

Grafana is the biggest example that comes to mind: https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/grafana-loki-tempo-relic...

This is inaccurate: you can definitely make "Hosted $THING" under AGPL. What you cannot do is modify said THING, host that (more precisely, make it publicly available as a service; if it's private, it's still ok), and keep the changes private.

> They license the software under AGPL, so it's still "free"

What's with the scare quotes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_under_the_GNU...

Some of the ones on that list I didn’t know used AGPL: Anki, Bitwarden, Ghostscript, EdX, Diaspora, Mastodon, Searx, Signal’s server code.

So a fair few from different time periods. Obviously doesn’t have the adoption rate of more popular open source licenses.

Nextcloud comes to mind.

Most other AGPL usage I'm aware of is using it as a poison pill license in order to sell a proprietary license.

Since it's in the news today... Mastodon.

> any popular opensource library using AGPL since?

Not quite a library, but overleaf (the online LaTeX editor) is pretty big in the scientific community and it's agpl.

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

iText, probably the most widely used non-Adobe PDF library, uses the AGPL.

Mold (the linker) uses it

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