Hacker News Reader

Comment by Communitivity | Hacker News Reader

This is a great project. However, given the nature of the project and the license, would this then require any software hosted with it to be AGPLv3? Could I run software that is a mix of Apache, MIT, and Erlang Public License in a VirtKick container without violating AGPLv3?

View on HN

All infra code needs to carry the MIT license or similar, IMHO. It's infrastructure.

I am sure any ambiguous licensing can be covered by some explicit statements, like what it applies to exactly and to what it doesn't. Good point though!

Virtkick has a web application component, which makes the AGPL a great choice. Without the 'Affero' component, anyone could host a version of VirtKick with proprietary modifications.

What's wrong with that? Don't we want to encourage proprietary companies to host using open software?

The point would be to enforce the openness of changes to the source. If you go in and add some things, change the design etc. and pass it off as your own, someone can take the changes you've made and do the same. Not only that, but you're required, not just encouraged, to make public any changes, which may or may not be improvements.

Adding and changing things does not necessarily precipitate passing off the work as one's own. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's a big problem with that with the truly free licenses like MIT...so I'm wondering - what's the point?

Node.js has been super popular for the past few years and it's built from mostly MIT style licenses. It's so hot that Microsoft has made a big effort to make it usable and provide tools to work with it on Windows. Nobody that I know of has come along and taken this product, re-branded it and then pawned it as their own creation.

I understand that the point of the Affero license is to prevent "Tivoization" of a product, but it seems to come at the cost of not being able to attract a large base of developers to contribute to the project, since everyone would rather be working with more liberal licenses.

So if I'm trying to use this in my proprietary product, I can either a) use it and open up all my code, or b) use a better-licensed, MIT/BSD/APSL2-compatible code.

I also might point out, as a person working on a proprietary service, it's in our interest to contribute upstream. Who wants to maintain compatibility patches? It's in EVERYONE's best interest to have solid, open infrastructure used by everyone (yes, even evil closed companies like google)

The AGPL prevents no such thing, they are free to do so provided they follow the license the creators published the code with.

Our intention is that you share code back to the project if you modified it and added some new great features. :) If I'm not wrong, it only applies to the modified source code, and not the data/machines that you work with. http://stackoverflow.com/a/18406382/504845

So, as your link mentions...why not just use GPL?

It's good enough for Linux.

likely because it could be a hosted application. If he were to choose the GPL then someone could make modifications and host them as a competitive advantage without sharing the modifications to their users.

AGPL means that if you modify VirtKick itself, you have to contribute these modifications back to the project. GPL does not enforce this for software run on a back end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com