[jka]

I keep hearing the AGPL-makes-corporations-wince argument, and I'm curious: what are the reasons given?

Does the AGPL really place such burdens on the organization such that the benefits of a locked-open, community-guaranteed (albeit popularity not guaranteed) technology aren't worthwhile?

Or is it kind of a cargo-culting and cultural-norms phenomenon where people don't use AGPL projects because they've heard that other people don't use them, thus continuing the cycle?

[__app_dev__]

I the early 2000's to mid 2010's I worked at an Architecture Firm (Buildings not Software) and at the time and likely now all plotters (large printers) depend on a software called Ghostscript. It's AGPL which prevents it from being bundled with any other software unless you negotiate a very expensive contract with their sales people.

If a company risks installing it or supporting it company wide then your risk lawsuit and having your business shutdown. The work-around is that for every user's computer IT must manually install the driver (a windows DLL file).

To me if I see AGPL it makes me think that it's likely a predatory business with good lawyers; and for this reason I would stay away from it even on personal projects unless there is no alternative.

[jka]

Thank you. For me the AGPL is at the complete other end of the spectrum: it's a stake in the ground to say "this software must be allowed to progress", even if the originating entity ceases to exist.

As I'll mention in a sibling thread, I think that lawyers can be extremely risk averse in software licensing (it's their professional incentive structure) and that is my guess where this cultural meme about AGPL comes from.

[kelnage]

In one of the of the organisations I mentioned, they had a strict policy against using any GPL dependencies, let alone the AGPL. I tried discussing this with the legal policy person but they were quite resolute - they feared it’s use could “infect” our code and therefore must be avoided.

I frankly doubt there’s any sort of cost-benefit analysis being done here. Certainly in my experience it was much more driven by legal uncertainty and risk-aversion.

[jka]

Thanks - yep, that matches my rough understanding of the view from the ground too.

Statisticians and scientists sometimes talk about 'type 1' errors and 'type 2' errors - false positives and false negatives. I can rarely remember which is which, but I think that generally, software license/contract legal professionals never want to advise a client about something that later turns out to be a liability.

That's fine, because it protects their firm's reputation, and it maintains the client's trust (which needs to be strong). But I think that in the context of software licenses, this has led to an overly strong aversion (and indeed self-replicating idea) about the AGPL and other copyleft licenses.

(in the context of cost-benefit, it's hard to justify the upside from using and helping contribute towards a software commons, but I think it can be significant, perhaps depending on project context and popularity)