People who use GPLv3 want the code to stay open/libre under any circumstances. If this is the goal, why not use the AGPL instead, even for applications which are not served over a network?
This takes away the possibility that people integrate parts of your program into a proprietary network application, even if this seems improbable. There’s nothing to loose with using this license, but potentially some gain.
Only reason I can think of is that AGPL is less known and trusted which may harm adoption.
AGPL is a sure-fire way to steer off corporate support.
GPL is usually fine for corporate use.
For example, Google and Meta actively contribute to Linux (GPL) but neither would ever touch an AGPL project for fear of infecting their other IP.
You make it sound as if corporations actually contribute a lot to open source projects they use. That is not the case in 99.9% of all cases where corporations decide to use some open source project.
If you are lucky as an open source maintainer you get a few patches from devs using their private email addresses to sneak the contribution around the legal department, but even that is rare. What you will see is random requests from company users to provide an SBOM for the entire project right now or bug reports asking to fix something right now.
So I seriously doubt you loose out when using AGPL or GPL.
They might hope to make money at any point in the future. AGPL is too viral to integrate with. Working at a large corporation they’ve banned a standalone desktop tool we could have used because it was AGPL. We wanted to pay for it, but we couldn’t. It’s a dead end product for corporate users. So personal use , hobbyists, and those companies that think the AGPL won’t infect their IP or don’t care. You limit your TAM severely if you use AGPL.
So if you aren’t in it to ever make money in the future, go for it.
This is simply wrong.
Is you release software that YOU OWN as AGPL, there is nothing stopping you from also licensing it as non AGPL, for a fee, in the future. I’m fact this is more possible with AGPL, since it disallows Tivoization.
If there’s a chance you want to make money off of it, AGPL is 1000x better than MIT. Once you release under MIT, a corporation can take it and do anything. If it’s AGPL a company can take it and do anything once they negotiate a license for it, and pay you for the privilege.
Some of my old projects were GPL because I didn’t know AGPL existed. It’s not one of the default options on GitHub, i.e. the place where 90% of open source developers debut their journey
Some time ago a client of me was looking for a solution to add watermarks to PDF files from their local on premise ERP system. The ERP system itself is a standard software. Obviously, they have a license to use that ERP but they definitely do not own the source code of it. Thus, they cannot change the license to AGPL or integrate it somehow.
I thought about writing a little plugin with Java in iFile to do that which is published unser AGPL. Using something under AGPL would mean that we have to make the entire solution available under that license.
Question 1: What is the entire solution in that scenario?
- Is it the part of the plugin that deals with watermarks?
- Is it the entire PDF handling plugin?
- Is it the entire process in the ERP system?
- Is it the entire ERP system that calls the plugin?
- Would it include sattelite systems that are connected to that ERP system that indirectly use the PDFs and thus potentially ‘infest’ the entire IT landscape?
- If the PDFs are send automatically to business partners of my client and they process it internally in their systems, are their systems now part of the solution?
Question 2: AGPL says users must have access to the source code of the solution no matter if they use it locally, over network etc. But Who is the user in such a scenario?
- The IT department of my client?
- The end users of the ERP system of my client who are only interested in the PDF but definitely not in the source code?
- Everyone at my client?
- Including business partners who might have access to the PDFs?
- Everyone?
Question 3: My client is not a software company, so they never published ANY source code or software. Where would you publish the code?
- The plugin for PDF creation would be called only in the background. The frontend is only standard ERP so I couldn’t easily put a link to the source code in the GUI.
- My client’s intranet?
- My client’s homepage?
- GitHub or a similar platform?
There is a lot of uncertainty when using AGPL software in a business context which will - in many cases - lead to the decision not to use the software at all.
You can always ask that question. Why not anticipate a potential use on the web and use the AGPL? Why not anticipate people wanting to incorporate parts of your code into their products and use the LGPL? Maybe it could be used within Android or in BSD and you should use Apache/MIT/BSD to avoid license incompatibility? (If your main concern is to give something to the world and not copyleft.) I mean you’re actively prohibiting combining code if you use a strong copyleft license, even if the BSD people have good intentions.
It’s an individual choice on a case by case basis. Obviously people will choose popular licenses more often, despite something being the correct choice. But every license has pros and cons. There is no single answer to licensing.
I may or may not care whether the code gets integrated into a proprietary network project, depending on the particular FOSS project. If it’s some general purpose command line widget, for instance, I would probably prefer not to restrict its usage in that context. If it were a long-running back-end online service project like MongoDB, though, that would be a different story, because that’s the kind of thing AGPL was created for.
GNU licenses aren’t about denying people from making money, they’re about ensuring that they share their code changes with everyone. AGPL was created to solve a new edge case concerning SaaS companies like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, etc.
