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by TomVDB 1830 days ago
Hi,

I love your work and the examples. The Doom example is great!

A search for “AGPL toxic” has a fair number of hits, both in favor and against. I honestly have no clue who to believe…

I’ll be using Google here as an example because they openly lists their internal open source policies, but other companies have similar rules: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/

Google prohibits SW licensed under AGPL not only on their servers, but even on employee laptops.

They fear contamination and forced release of their internal IP, because, compared to regular GPL licenses, the AGPL has some language in it that makes it problematic making those tools available on a network.

This may be an overreaction on their part, but I’m not in a position to argue that case.

The comment on your GitHub issue, that generated Verilog isn’t covered by the license terms, is understandable, but without a real license it’s probably only just that, a comment, and even if it provides legal cover for generated code, it still doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change the blanket ban of AGPL licensed tools.

Google does not have such strong objections against GPL3, which differs from the AGPL3 in just one paragraph.

1 comments

Thanks for the feedback and pointers, I'll be looking into both issues (AGPL and the question of generated code).