[boredandroid]

I agree that the proliferation of new licenses is annoying. But I think the reason you see changes in licensing from Elastic, MongoDB, etc is that the world has changed pretty dramatically since most of the original licenses were created. This proliferation existed early on in the days of open source and eventually died down to a set of standard things that solved the problems most people had. But the reality is the public cloud has dramatically changed the dynamic and many of the people who want to make code available with a permissive license don't have an option that is common and well understood and that protects them. I believe such a thing will likely emerge and will allow us all to standardize.

[zozbot123]

> many of the people who want to make code available with a permissive license don't have an option that is common and well understood and that protects them.

The AGPL is that option. It is a copyleft license that explicitly regulates the 'public performance' of software (putting conditions on public performance of a copyrighted work is a right of all copyright owners, there's nothing "exotic" involved here) in order to close the perceived 'service provider loophole' where software that's made available as part of an application services platform is not required to make its complete source code available, including even modifications that are purportedly asserted to be "for internal use".

[boredandroid]

We address that here: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq

Short answer: 1. AGPL doesn't actually solve this problem. This is why MongoDB just moved away from AGPL. 2. AGPL is quite restrictive for people who want to use the software in proprietary applications but don't want to open source their own code. This is a really large proportion of usage for us and we don't want to restrict people in that way.

[jfim]

The AGPL isn't well defined.

Say that your SaaS product to share pictures of cats uses database X, which is AGPL licensed. Depending on how you read the license, your SaaS product could have to be licensed as AGPL. Or not.

That ambiguity is why many companies won't touch the AGPL with a mile long pole.

[detaro]

If that were the only issue, all these new licenses could just write a clarified version of AGPL that stays within the OSI definition.