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by mdaniel 1387 days ago
It's for sure not "wrong," as (a) it's your software (b) people have different concerns they want to have addressed by license terms

For me, and the company I work for, AGPL is strictly banned. GPL is gravely frowned upon, because the founder had a lot of lawyers involved that almost bombed an acquisition. I appreciate that's anecdata, but for sure it is a "conversation" in the company versus Apache 2 which requires no conversation

I'm actually kind of luke-warm about AGPL for some things, but for what I imagine is a JVM agent, and thus both injected into my software and communicates over the network, hard pass

For clarity: I didn't mean my comment as a scolding: the community is almost certainty better off for you having chosen to share the code, and there will be folks who can and do contribute fixes under the terms of the AGPL. It's just been my overpowering experience that a lot of companies that try to open source code are trying to guard against "being Amazon-ed" and I appreciate why they think that way

1 comments

> For me, and the company I work for, AGPL is strictly banned. GPL is gravely frowned upon, because the founder had a lot of lawyers involved that almost bombed an acquisition. I appreciate that's anecdata, but for sure it is a "conversation" in the company versus Apache 2 which requires no conversation

This seems to be a development tool that does not need to be incorporated into your software (I'm assuming the library that runs in your software won't be AGPL but I could be wrong *), so it being AGPL should theoretically be strictly less restrictive than just being closed source.

However, perhaps for companies with policies against (A)GPL software like yours it would be better if they offered it both as freeware under a closed source license that doesn't allow modifications AND open source under the AGPL so you could pick which license you like better?

*Actually strictly speaking even if the agent software is AGPL I believe that would only really matter if you distributed a version of the software including the agent outside of your company, so theoretically you could just remove it for production releases, but I agree that it would be a lot more justified to avoid it because of the license in that case, so I hope they intend to release the agent software under a more permissive license.