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Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

This looks very cool and I'm excited to try it out later today. In the past I've tried Huginn but I have always found Ruby to be particularly unapproachable and the first integration I tried was broken (the weather integration) and despite submitting a PR to fix it, the PR has languished for years.

Here's some questions:

- How does this differ from Huginn?

- How easy is it to install integrations from outside the main source tree? In other words, can I create an integration and publish it on my own Github profile and have others use it with ease?

- Is Automatisch a purely OSS project, or are you planning to build a business around it? What type of business model?

- Is Automatisch primarily focused at home users or business use cases? The integrations listed in the docs seem primarily home-focused.

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From gleaning at the repo's license, they use AGPL. So that seems tailored towards building a business around it. I find that quite exciting, because I have been thinking about which license to use for a project of mine as well, so that a) it is open-source, and b) I can build a business on top of it. AGPL seems to fit the bill perfectly, as long as you are careful about the license of contributions.

We spent some time to research about licenses. AGPL allows us to keep it open source and also build a business around it as you said.

Is technically open source the best kind of open source? It is open source according to the OSI, but many including myself are interested in open source for specific reasons that the AGPL doesn't satisfy.

Isn't the use of AGPL specifically to stop many including yourself's specific reasons? They want to build a business off it, not build your business off it.

If the license doesn't work for your use case, the license seems to have done its job successfully.

The AGPL is for preserving software freedom in today's networked, service-as-a-software-substitute world. It isn't supposed to be for building a business.

The ability to communicate is for warning our tribe of danger. It isn't supposed to be for talking about open source software.

Intentions and realities are often different. Such is life.

What can't you do with AGPL stuff that you want to do?

Thanks a lot!

- It may not differ in the sense of integrations and general functionality. However, the most significant difference is that we aim not only for developers but also general users who may not have programming knowledge.

- At the moment, it's only possible if we merge the integration into the source code, but we're thinking about possible ways to have external integrations and also private integrations.

- We would like to build a business around it without limiting the open-source version in terms of integrations and core functionality. It's still in the plan, but I can say that only the enterprise feature set will require payment.

- We focused on mostly business use cases, but we also have home users, and we're happy to support them.

How does the license factor into your business model? Sounds like you are going for an open core model where the enterprise feature set is implemented by separate proprietary code addons?

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