Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nine_k 3141 days ago
I'm sorry about your decision. AGPL is not a way to make corporations pay for your code. It's a way to make corporations stay the hell away from your code. This may be a legitimate goal, but apparently not in your case.

Due to the viral nature of AGPL, they have hard time trying your code to decide if it is worth using. Due to copyright assignment and patent clauses, they have very hard time contributing anything back.

What more or less works is GPL + commercial license, the freemium model. You need to get enough free users on your bandwagon to show corporate users that the code is worth trying, and maybe paying for. You need to get corporations hire you to provide support and develop special features they need in the paid tier.

Not that this problem is completely solved, but likely you heard about e.g. MySQL or Nginx who use the freemium model.

1 comments

I've always been kind of unclear on how the AGPL works, even after reading various TL;DR-ish explainers. What happens if you link/import AGPL code in, vs running an AGPL service as a separate process as part of your architecture?