[nrser]

RethinkDB is AGPL? can you elaborate more on the issues? was planning on using Rethink, and this is making me, well, re-think it.

not sure if interpretations have changed in the last six years, but i went through an acquisition with a lot of focus on open source licenses in 2010 and from what i remember AGPL was not something you wanted to have touched with a ten foot ethernet cord if you had any proprietary code - the conservative stance being that AGPL could be read to potentially open source anything that communicated with it.

i know that's not how the license is explained or is "supposed to work", but the IP team's explanation (WSGR, seemed to know what they were talking about) is remember it was that copy-left licenses didn't have a lot of case law built up around them to clearly defined their de-facto legal mechanics. if you were a large company like Google, FB, etc., you could pretty much decide how you were going to interpret those licenses because you have the resources to defend those interpretations in court, but as a small company going through an acquisition this was a great way for an acquirer to say "hey, doesn't look like this stuff is really worth all that much because it's potentially all free."