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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

"I work in industry. Anything GPL is a non-starter. I totally understand and appreciate the concerns, but at BigCorp GPL doesn't play. "

Maybe at some. I work at Google (in fact, i ran open source licensing :P). GPL is just fine for whatever. If you want to use it in server stuff, whatever. If you want to use it in client stuff, great, you ship source code to the right parts. As long as your product group/etc is willing to do what the license asks, we don't care.

I've met about ~130 of my counterparts at large corps. I'd say about 40% have policies like yours. The other 60% though, are closer to us.

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In these discussions AGPL has been mentioned as solving some of the short-comings of GPL. What is your company's policy regarding AGPL?

AGPL closes the "running on a public server isn't distribution" loophole in the GPL. AGPL is better for freedom.

Google et al want that loophole, so are ardently anti-AGPL

Buzz, thanks for playing, see my response :)

We aren't "ardently anti AGPL", we just don't use it or care. Certainly, I personally think it's a bad license for a bunch of reasons (related to my response, etc). But Google as whole simply doesn't publicly care one way or the other (IE isn't strongly AGPL). If you want to use it, great. We are fine not using it, and we tend not to contribute to AGPL software.

Certainly you realize that with the amount of AGPL source code being so small and not really growing at any real rate, Google simply doesn't have to care?

Why would we run around trying to stop the AGPL?

We don't allow AGPL.

AGPL is very easy to control for the external facing stuff, but not the internal stuff.

For example, based on how it defines remote network interaction, it doesn't differentiate internal or external users. So if we used AGPL in internal systems that Temps, vendors, and contractors had access to, we'd end up owing all the temps, vendors, and contractors source code to the internal system, regardless of what other NDA's or anything else were in place (it's well settled that you can't contract around or NDA folks into giving up GPL/AGPL rights)

We aren't willing to take this risk (and i'd bet most companies that are doing it don't realize this is an issue :P)

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