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Comment by ryan_lane | Hacker News Reader

Using a non-OSI approved license hurts your users considerably more than AGPL (and this is coming from someone who generally doesn't like the AGPL). Legal teams are far less likely to approve licenses like the one you've chosen, than AGPL.

I could convince a legal team to allow an AGPL service, depending on how we were using it. It would be difficult to get them to allow us to use this license, and I definitely couldn't convince them to allow us to contribute to software using this license.

Effectively, you've ensured you won't have a community, because in reality the project is closed source, and dead if your company dies, which means it's not an option for me to consider.

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This is not representative of my experience. AGPL is unconditionally banned at most companies where I know the answer to this question. They don't care if the license is OSI-approved, they care if it aligns with their business requirements and objectives. Most companies are not ideological about open source.

BSL is at least making an attempt to address the legitimate concerns of businesses -- both sides -- in a balanced and pragmatic way. I have no dog in this fight, being neither a BSL licensor nor licensee (nor AGPL for that matter), but having been party to the legal conversations at large companies I understand why BSL is generally considered to be more acceptable than AGPL. BSL may or may not be the right license for this software, I have no opinion, but businesses don't care about arguments from ideological purity. If BSL satisfies their requirements better than AGPL, and anecdotally all the evidence seems to support this notion, then they will go with BSL software.

To put it another way, if OSI is serious about being in the conversation about the future of software licensing, they must address the reasons so many companies refuse to adopt AGPL software.

I wonder how involved you've been in these kinds of discussions. I've run open source programs at companies, and worked together with the legal teams in terms of what was and was not allowed.

Transferring copyright to another company, without a contract with that company, for the most part is something a legal team isn't going to agree to. BSL only addresses one side's concerns, and it's not in your favor.

AGPL, when used for internal services that customers don't interact with, is generally not that difficult to get approved. How many companies are using mongodb, for instance?

I do not have any practical, first hand experience with either license. Re -agpl, i know for a fact that it is banned in corporations. We choose BSL to avoid this. Say if a team in amazon would want to use DF internally they could. I know for a fact that AGPL is a big no there. If we are mistaken and BSL is also banned then we will need to see what to do.

I hope people will understand the reason behind bsl. I hope people will see apache there and will help us to grow. Based on HN comments some already do.

As someone building software for a living I fully agree with your decision to not go full OSS. It’s always a hefty discussion but I feel most of the people only exist on the receiving end of software and do not have to worry how a license impacts real life distribution. Big corp (I’m from Germany) DOES hesitate to go with any form of non-Apache-2 licensed OSS software. In Germany often times OSS is even discouraged if there’s no commercial support for it.

I understand the emotions people have regarding licenses that do allow them to work with software as they please - but I also think it’s useless to argue around licensing of a software instead of focusing on the good it can do. Something being proprietary has NO impact on your choice to buy it when outside of the software world. Why does it here?

The problem you are pointing out is not the open source license, it's the lack of support. If they offered AGPL with a dual-license version and made a strong message about commercial support, they could please both crowds without compromises.

> I do not have any practical, first hand experience with either license.

I do have practical first hand experience with both. I can get a legal team to approve the use of AGPL, but I cannot get them to approve BSL, unless we've signed a contract with the company.

Having an understanding of the license, and some first hand experience seems like it would be a pretty important thing, when choosing it, especially for a business.

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