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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

Not saying you shouldn't do this, but by publishing under AGPL plus

If you are an individual person or a not-for-profit organization, and your usage of this software is entirely non-commercial, you may use this software under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, summarized below and reprinted in full thereafter.

you have effectively created a new license and it's not completely clear to me what that new license even means exactly, except that obviously a company should stay far away from it.

With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.

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AGPL has language to cover such things, e.g.

> All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

So it seems at best there is a need for a middle man who gets the AGPL licensed version that can then propagate it further under pure AGPL.

I think that language is meant for the case where someone takes an AGPL programs, slaps another restriction on it, and sends it along.

The last person in the chain can disregard the extra "conditions".

But this only works if someone distributed it under (only) the AGPL in the first. In the specific case with the software we are talking about now, that is not the case. It was originally distributed under this almost-AGPL.

But yes, the wording inside the AGPL makes it extra confusing exactly. It reads like those test where the instruction is "before you do anything, read all the questions".

This doesn’t make sense to me. If one clause says another clause can be removed, then doesn’t that create a contradiction where legally it’s unclear which of the two clauses “wins” the fight - the one adding additional restrictions or the one removing that clause?

Use the AGPL. I promise not to sue any individual person or non-profit org.

And you’re right, for-profit companies should either stay away for safety or contact me for terms.

The danger here is that your additional terms might be ineffective. The problem is, if you distribute it to an individual or a non-profit organization under the terms of the AGPL, then that individual or non-profit organization has the right to redistribute the software to anyone, including for-profit organizations, under the terms of the AGPL. It says so in the very first sentence after the copyright notice!

So if you do not want to allow this, then you must use something other than the AGPL. (Or maybe you could do some funky patching of the AGPL's terms, but you'd have to be careful to only do so by reference, since its text is copyrighted by the FSF, who only permit distribution of verbatim copies.)

Also, you should probably avoid calling it "fully free & open source" as you did in your original comment, since you intend for it to be neither Free nor Open Source in the sense ordinarily meant by FOSS.

Plenty of FOSS is dual licensed, this really isn’t as hard or complicated as some are making it out to be.

In all dual-licensed FOSS projects which require licensees to comply with the terms of both licenses, both of them include an unlimited right to redistribution. Also, roughly no projects do that with the AGPL, since the AGPL includes the right to cast off any additional terms when redistributing.

But your intent, if you want to avoid for-profit organizations using your software, is to impose a restriction on users not to redistribute the software in certain ways. It is your right to add such a restriction to your software, but it is no longer FOSS, since that term necessarily implies an unlimited right to redistribution (within the law).

Your first claim is provably wrong; look at the license for MySQL as an example of a dual license where the licensee chooses which terms to follow based on their usage.

Redistribution is unlimited for all non-commercial use. This has been through legal review.

If you’re still confused, please contact me directly and I’ll be happy to answer any other questions.

> With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.

Nitpick: the company can use AGPL code wherever, it only needs to make the updated source code available to users. In many shops, devs would be perfectly ok with that, where legal depts are still mostly living in the world of "opensource it with MIT/Apache to make sure we can take it down tomorrow, just in case".

>it's not completely clear to me what that new license even means exactly, except that obviously a company should stay far away from it

And that is his problem because?

It’s only a problem if confusion is a problem.

Personally, I don’t think I would contribute as a private individual either, since the Software effectively isn’t Open Source.

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