Hacker News Reader

right but the GPL explicitly allows commercial use, which isn't what the original comment was about ("use in production requires a fee"); i agree with the previous comment that such a license is hard to assess for a hobbyist, but the GPL is not such a license (hence yes it's simple enough)

View on HN

Even though it's technically allowed, a lot of companies are afraid of it. Not GPL2 - that's used a lot, because tivoization lets them ignore the spirit of it. But they fear GPL3 and AGPL.

You can also just do a crayon license. "All rights reserved, noncommercial use allowed." Nobody's stopping you. If and when Debian wants to ship your package, ask them for proper legal advice about changing it, they have lawyers.

I'm not sure there's a lot of fear of GPLv3 out there. Linus just didn't want to adopt it for Linux.

AGPL is a different matter because companies are unsure of the boundaries between their own proprietary code and any AGPL code they're using.

Companies that make physical products are afraid of GPLv3 because of the anti-tivoization clause. Cloud companies aren't, but they're afraid of the AGPLv3, because of the anti-cloud-tivoization clause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com