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Comment by knorker | Hacker News Reader

Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.

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If you don't want to give people downstream of you my source code, I'm happy to sell you a commercial license.

This means you have only solved the problem for large companies, and specifically those who have money and who have a functioning procurement system that's developer-driven. Which is a very narrow use case.

Also relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596403

You can also just give people downstream of you my source code, supporting software freedom. Then you can use it for free.

Again, that only works for large companies, and for companies that can exists even if their service is downloadable.

Which fine, you can choose to take that political stance. But that's a stance of "I want to change the world to my liking", not "I want to help the world/people".

Up to you, of course, but I prefer to help not only large companies.

But that's the whole point of dual AGPL + commercial licensing.

Sure, but for anything except large companies it has a bootstrapping problem. I'm absolutely not going to use AGPL software in a test one-person trying to sell a service kind of deal. So if it takes off, I'm already on a non-AGPL stack, so why reach out at that point to get a commercial license for software I don't even use?

And hell, even without money involved, I'm not going to make a hobby project with AGPL software either. Not only may I have small parts of the project I've not opensourced, but AGPL is untested in how far the virality goes. Are my backup cronjobs in scope? I certainly don't want to be the test case for this. Even if I win against an AGPL troll, I'll still lose.

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