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Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

I wonder howa change to MIT license should improve situation? Means with AGPL adoption was low because…?

I'm subject to a moratorium on AGPL software at work. Some legal departments forbid or highly restrict use of AGPL licenses. They are concerned the licenses' viral nature causing problems for their software products.

Not that I agree with them, but, also, IANAL.

Let's see that positively: with such a moratorium, we're less at risk of having some AGPL software used without respecting its licene terms :-)

I'm guessing that's what the commercial license option was for.

I'm sure it is - but that leaves the engineer with the calculation to do of "time this commercial tool will save me" versus "time/goodwill I will burn trying to get the purchase approved".

This is also true of SaaS dev tools.

There are plenty of ways to reduce friction. In this case, mold could have offered a 30 day commercial license to the company to demo the linker and see if the ROI was worth it.

moral of the story is tools don't sell regardless of license.

If mold can't sell I don't know which tool will, because they are really ahead in linking.

Sometimes they do. But at best they support a small development team, and better if they help a niche to such an extreme that there isn’t a critical mass of people able to band together and make a free version. Something like hexrays is an example but IIRC open source tools are replacing them now.

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