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Comment by romange | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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