Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

I wonder to what extent the AGPL license actually facilitates the creation of a commercial business based on the software; large online service customers who would be willing to use even GPL software without paying anybody for it might be more likely to opt to negotiate a commercial license for AGPL code.

If that is the case, though, and their revenue model is based on providing non-AGPL access to MongoDB, doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?

View on HN

> doesn't that rather put MongoDB in the position of commercially exploiting the work of developers who contribute their code under the expectation that it will be freely shared under AGPL?

While the MongoDB product is open source and licensed under the AGPL, they very rarely accept outside contributions. A vast majority of the product was built by 10gen/MongoDB, so this is less of an issue than it would be for something like Postgres.

Which seems like further evidence that the use of AGPL is somewhat disingenuous - more a poison-pill than a genuine attempt to embrace free software principles. If I use MongoDB, and modify it to suit my needs, I have to make my changes available to anyone who consumes a service I back with my modified MongoDB. MongoDB Inc., presumably by virtue of having licensing agreements in place with all the copyright holders whose code is in their core distribution of the product, have the ability not to do that. They could, however, examine my improvements and do a cleanroom reimplementation of them.

The real risk to them is that a vastly improved fork of MongoDB is built up by contributors who don't license over their contributions to MongoDB Inc., preventing their incorporation into commercial licensed versions...

The GPLs are meant to be poison pills. That's what they are for. Mongo's use of the license this way is standard, then in addition they allow you to buy the antidote.

People giving out code for free is poisonous? Here is someone people saying: "Hey, wrote some nice software. Here. You want it? Take it. We like it. It's Free.".

Now if you want to take that software and give it to someone else, they ask you to not go around the hide where you got it, what changes you made to it, and not sue people for patents over that software.

Its a polite, if backed up statement, that people can't go around using other people software and then be exploitative about it. Play nice, or do not play at all. Is it really your view that doing so is poisonous?

> The real risk to them is that a vastly improved fork of MongoDB is built up by contributors who don't license over their contributions to MongoDB Inc., preventing their incorporation into commercial licensed versions...

aka MariaDB :)

I don't quite follow, in that all dual-licensed business models seem to be based on this exploitation? What's different about AGPL?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com