Hacker News Reader

Moral of the story: If you publish something as Open Source, someone may actually make use of it.

Yeah that looks to be the case. Reading the OpenFront readme, it looks like they transitioned to the AGPL believing it to be stricter (which it might be?).

What's also funny is the FrontWars fork's readme.md [1] has not been changed at all, and still credits the OpenFront maintainer as the project maintainer:

> The project maintainer (evan) has final authority on all code changes and design decisions

[1] https://github.com/Elitis/FrontWars/

It is stricter in the sense that AGPL says you have to release source code even if you only distribute the software to a user via a network (i.e., browser) as opposed to a direct/binary distribution.

So in my lay (possibly incorrect) opinion the AGPL made the difference in them having to release the code at all. So in that way it did help. If the user thought this would stop clones then they don't understand software licensing (nor open source).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com