[License-discuss] What's wrong with the AGPL?

[Dirk Riehle]

On 20.06.24 02:35, Josh Berkus wrote:
> A lot of this discussion has been around the AGPL "failing" startups 
> who wanted to use it to protect themselves from web service competition.
>
> This is not that the AGPL was written for.
>
> The AGPL was written for projects like CiviCRM, which had a direct 
> threat of "embrace and extend" by proprietary vendors.  The AGPL did, 
> and still does, a fine job of preventing nonprofit OSS projects from 
> having their code modified, extended, and improved by proprietary 
> service vendors without back contribution.

It works for CiviCRM (non-profit) like it works (worked) for SugarCRM 
(commercial). If you can AGPL the whole application without additional 
permissive client library shims etc, it works as intended. It doesn't 
work for the component vendors that came later and which needed more 
complicated licensing; the vendors problem is that they can't separate 
potential customers from hyperscalers through licensing strategy.

> The struggle that startups are having is that they don't want code 
> contributions, they want money. Copyleft is not a business model.

Commercial open source application providers can use copyleft as a 
successful anti-competition strategy, commercial open source component 
vendors have not found a good way (yet).

So I also think that the component vendors are barking up the wrong 
tree, blaiming their failure to find a solution to on the tools they 
were using (the available licenses).

The bad part: The other side, the hyperscalers, seem to be in cahoots 
with the vendors, because they also want to see the AGPL considered 
ineffective.

So we have two opposing parties, both claiming the AGPL is no good, for 
their own reasons, both wrong IMO.

Cheers, Dirk

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