[williamstein]

> And nice to see you’ve kept it open source instead of some other Show HN submissions where they take open source work, make is closed, change a few things, and claim they’ve created something great.

The seem to have taken a "BSD-3-Clause" licensed project and change it to AGPLv3 licensed one. That's not the same thing, but it's similar to what you're concerned about.

[prasoonds]

This is true. All new added code is licensed under AGPLv3. But I fail to see how it's the same thing as modifying and open-source tool and re-selling it as a closed source tool. This is what AGPL gives us - anyone can use Pretzel however they want. They can even re-package and re-sell it if they want so long as they too open-source their modifications and improvements.

Selecting the license for an open-source tool backed by a company is tricky. You want your code to be open-source for it's benefits (for eg, for us one benefit is building trust with people working with sensitive data). But, the history of open-source tools is full of tools that another company just started reselling without doing any of the work (sentry, mongodb etc). So, you need to find a balance. AGPLv3 strikes the right balance for us.

[williamstein]

> ... I fail to see how it's the same thing ...

You're right that it is not the same thing, which is why I wrote "That's not the same thing [...]" in the comment you're responding to. I have done the same as you guys (building an AGPLv3 or 'worse' product on top of BSD licensed code) many, many times! Anyway, what you're doing is really exciting!

[prasoonds]

That's fair, I was mostly responding to "but it's similar to what you're concerned about" because I didn't think the concerns are the same (but I can see your perspective on it too! While we are "giving away" the code, we're definitely posing some limitation).

Thanks for the kind words, we're exited to be building this :)

[williamstein]

I would also be happy to video chat with you guys anytime, since we've built similar things over the years (wstein at sagemath.com).

[lmeyerov]

How does that even work, copying in and relicensing someone's bsd3 code as your own AGPLv3?

[prasoonds]

You're right, that's not how it would work! If you look at our license - all the Jupyter code stays BSD3. If we modify any BSD3 code, the modified code stays BSD3. All the new code we write - in separate files - is AGPLv3 however and is clearly delineated in the repo in the file headers.