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by slownews45 1792 days ago
(A)GPLv3 actually has seen some real growth corporate side -> it's used commonly by proprietary tech companies as sort of a poison license (Microsoft had some of these like SSPL).

The way this works is all contributors are required to sign a CLA -> the corporate developer can then use their code under ANY license, and most importantly can integrate into propriatery products or sell to others.

The code is then released as an AGPLv3 to be "open source" - but literally the only company with the "super" rights to license / make money off it is the corp dev.

It's kind of genius -> so I think we may see more (A)GPLv3 stuff coming this way. The corp developer can then offer for example a hosted version of the software WITHOUT releasing all the related code! But anyone else would have to release their code.

You an see how this is done here:

https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/cla/
3 comments
blendergeek 1792 days ago
> The way this works is all contributors are required to sign a CLA -> the corporate developer can then use their code under ANY license, and most importantly can integrate into propriatery products or sell to others.

If a third party is contributing a lot of code that is highly relevant, the third party is under no obligation to sign the CLA. The third party is entirely within her rights to refuse to sign the CLA and distribute an AGPLv3-only fork of the software.

If this fork is significantly better than the original, the original authors are out of luck when it comes to proprieatary relicensing.

This is what happened with OwnCloud/Nextcloud. OwnCloud was AGPLv3 but required a CLA. OwnCloud became OpenCore and started distributing "enterprise" features as proprietary upgrades. Some developers were unhappy with this and forked OwnCloud and started developing Nextcloud. All contributions to Nextcloud are AGPLv3 only and cannot be re-licensed by Owncloud. Interestingly enough, any new code released under AGPLv3 by Owncloud can still be used by Nextcloud.

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necovek 1792 days ago
> But anyone else would have to release their code.

Which I think is perfectly fair: you are getting a full product, and you can do with it as you please (including profit off of it), as long as you publish your changes too!

The fact that the original copyright holder has the rights to close it off for future developments is completely natural, and if you do not want to allow them to do that, don't sign a CLA and fork. Oh, there's a cost in maintaining a fork? Pick your poison then :)

To me what matters is that once you get the software, you have freedom to use and modify it. I am ok if you do not have the "freedom" to close it off. If you start being a bigger contributor than the original company, you avoid all of the problems with a fork, but you can't say you did not benefit from the original AGPL release.

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gkbrk 1792 days ago
> The code is then released as an AGPLv3 [...] but the only company with the rights to make money off it is the corp dev.

Actually anyone that has the AGPL code can sell and/or make money from it. People regularly buy GPL software and pay monthly subscriptions to hosted AGPL software.

If you can't compete without having some code as "trade secrets"; that's your failed business model, not a fault of the license.

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