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Comment by zh217 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, and maybe I need to consult a lawyer someday to get the facts straight. To tell you the truth my head hurts when I attempt to understand what these licenses say. Regardless, I intend this project to be true FOSS, the "finer detail" of which FOSS license it uses may change.

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My understanding is the same as kylebarron's[0] since you lack linking protections (which you would get under LGPL), so any work that includes cozo would be a "derived work" under the (A)GPL. Interestingly there doesn't seem to be an affero LGPL license[1], which could be what you might want here.

Otherwise, simplest solution provided you want a copyleft license would be to use the LGPL I think.

NOTE: not a lawyer.

[0] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1078...

[1] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2012/09/07/opening-the-infrast... (old link, but I couldn't find anything since then describing this kind of license?)

We kinda do have it; it's just mostly useless, given the linking clause. (Not entirely useless, though, as that article sets out.)

GPL and AGPL have the same layout, so you can just take the LGPL, and replace all references to 'GPL' and 'GNU General Public License' with 'AGPL' and 'GNU Affero General Public License'. Of course, you couldn't call that license 'GNU ALGPL' or 'GNU LAGPL'; you'd have to come up with your own name. (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't checked this as thoroughly as I would if I were going to use this for my own software.)

Maybe it's worth bothering Bradley M. Kuhn (http://ebb.org/bkuhn/) again and seeing what the current status of a Lesser AGPL is?

its also odd then re the python bindings being MIT, as the AGPL will convey throughout any aggregation or library usage, as would GPL, the primary delta for GPL vs AGPL is the intent on the later for network offered services, which in the context of an embedded library/db is odd. rightly or wrongly many orgs will refuse to allow usage of gpl/agpl software due to the licensing concerns around the effects of the rest of their ip. duckdb (embedded analytics sql) uses mit, etc. so in terms of creating a "true foss" project ie a community of users and contributors, its definitely worth considering a licensing change imho, but of course dealers choice.

OP here. Nothing about the license is final yet since there are no outside contributors. I just changed the main repo to LGPL, not because what I believed in changed, but because it seems that I really misunderstood the licenses.

That's a fair enough stance. I'd recommend not taking any outside contributions until you are sure about the license, since it'll make it much harder to change the license if you do. Or maybe require all outside contributions to be licensed very permissively, like using the BSD license. Or you could use a CLA, but that's not something I'd recommend. Either way, licensing is hard :(. I can emphasise with the head hurting.... Oh, also, check out https://tldrlegal.com/ .

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