AGPLv3 is the cloud-condom open-source licensing model for the future. You are protected from the cloud-providers, who otherwise to monetize open-source projects that enterprise vendors develop. For example, MongoDB got offered money by AWS to include it in Redshift, but they said no - MongoDB is AGPLv3. AWS just took postgres and MySQL for free, because they could. Who earns the most from, yet contributes the least to, Hadoop? AWS!
If you're Hortonworks, Cloudera, or Data Artisans (Flink) are you celebrating AWS' monetization of the software you develop?
Honestly, i think Apache licensed open-source software is dead for startups. Cloud providers do not compete on an even field anymore, and the basic premise of an open ecosystem for Apache software is now a pipe-dream - cloud providers (mostly, AWS) will dominate providing managed versions of Apache licensed software. Long live AGPL-v3!
I don't necessarily agree with you, and I'm generally not a fan of the AGPL... but have an upvote nonetheless, just for raising an interesting line of discussion.
I am curious to see if the AGPL begins to gain traction as we move into more and more of a cloud-oriented world.
Yes, this is a big issue for many infrastructure startups. The AGPL scares potential users and customers away, but permissive license often get taken advantage of.
At FOSSA, we've commissioned a new license called the Commons Clause (http://commonsclause.com/) that tries to address this exact problem, so that developers can create permissive software without being exploited by providers.
What's the point of using a permissive license then? Why not just use a (situation appropriate -- i.e. LGPL, GPL, or AGPL depending on what precisely the software is) copyleft license?
The point is to prevent service providers like Amazon from making money by the software you built, but still allow end users to operate and self-host and modify it.
I've recently seen http://scip.zib.de/#license. " You are allowed to retrieve SCIP for research purposes as a member of a non-commercial and academic institution.". Could help keeping alive an academic community around it.
But that's the opposite (or at least orthogonal) to what the article is saying?
Users who don't contribute back also don't waste your time. It's the would-be contributors who clog things up with requests that you have to worry about.
Imagine people being in court and trying to argue that to a court or jury. The copyright holder arguing that the Service is made available online, presenting screenshots and video of copyrighted elements being presented through a online service, and the defense arguing that the service is not made available since the Proprietary service sits between the user and service.
Getting around the law through technical means sounds great from a technical standpoint but tend to fall flat once a non-technical person looks at it and don't see the technical layer. The obvious example was BitTorrent which people initial argued did not constitute copyright infringement based on an number of arguments, one being that only minor parts of the whole work is ever sent by any single person. Similar people argued that streaming was legal since no one received a copy of the work. Outside-> streaming service -> copyrighted work did not really separate outside from the copyrighted work in a way that made a legal difference.
No, you can't make material modifications to infrastructure software without modifying the software itself, at least not without a substantial loss of efficiency and performance.
It is like trying to make a new type of database engine by writing a wrapper around someone else's database engine. It works -- tons of open source databases essentially do exactly this -- but it has well-understood adverse consequences to scalability and performance such that you'll never be competitive in a benchmarks or efficiency game.
> You are protected from the cloud-providers, who otherwise to monetize open-source projects that enterprise vendors develop.
What if I don't care if other monetize my work?
An example: People monetize BSD all the time, -yet I rarely see them discussing licensing changes out in the open at least.
To take it even further: it seems like even if the source code is completely free companies gives back.
As for now my only reason to go with AGPL would be if I wanted to provide a dual licensed library, with AGPL for open source version and a separate commercial version.
I think for the time being I'd actually feel bad if I made a brilliant libary and only released it under AGPL. Why? Because it could have been even more useful to humanity if everyone (including other developers of commercial software like me) could use it.
Honestly, i think Apache licensed open-source software is dead for startups. Cloud providers do not compete on an even field anymore, and the basic premise of an open ecosystem for Apache software is now a pipe-dream - cloud providers (mostly, AWS) will dominate providing managed versions of Apache licensed software. Long live AGPL-v3!