[Conan_Kudo]

Why not just use Affero GNU General Public License v3 for these? It seems like a lot of you guys are using ASL 2.0 (a permissive license) and getting upset when people fork and proprietarize the code for their services and solutions.

Aside from MongoDB, who seems to be changing the license simply to kill off MongoDB's vendor ecosystem to benefit itself, everyone else seems to be using ASL 2.0 and then regretting the natural consequences of doing so.

The usage of the AGPLv3 license seems to be enough to ward off large SaaS competitors (Amazon and Google stay away from areas that are heavily AGPLv3 or similar).

[boredandroid]

This is a great question. Many people think the AGPL solves this problem but it absolutely does not. This is why MongoDB, which was AGPL licensed, just changed to a custom license.

The other reason we don't want to use AGPL is that it can be quite aggressive in making you open source your own code if you want to embed our code in a proprietary application. We actually think building proprietary applications is a fine use of our software, and is one of the major use cases for this kind of infrastructure. This is addressed in more depth along with many other questions in this FAQ: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq

[Conan_Kudo]

> This is a great question. Many people think the AGPL solves this problem but it absolutely does not. This is why MongoDB, which was AGPL licensed, just changed to a custom license.

If the goal is to kill off all potential vendors participating in your ecosystem, then yes, AGPL doesn't work. But if the goal is to prevent cloud provider abuse (e.g. Google, AWS, Azure, etc.), it works well enough.

> The other reason we don't want to use AGPL is that it can be quite aggressive in making you open source your own code if you want to embed our code in a proprietary application.

If you wanted to avoid that, you could grant an exception to be slightly more permissive for that purpose or to otherwise clarify the grant of use.

I know I personally would appreciate it if vendors who don't like the consequences of using ASL 2.0 would consider this option as an alternative.

And of course, selling full exceptions to AGPL in its entirety is a valid business model option.