Re:RethinkDB is shutting down
by woliveirajr on Thursday October 06, 2016 @12:44PM
(#12653905)
I've worked in a project that used some AGPL component. There were some many doubts on what should be open-sourced/which licenses were possible that we dropped that component and invested or time modification another one.
After some while, that component changed its licensing model. It was too late.
Exactly, I call the AGPL anxiety license. It create so much problem in the mindset that is VERY commercial unfriendly.
GPL/AGPL requires you to share your code if you statically (or dynamically) link (which is a C language family concept) to GPL code, but I don't know if calling an API is considered "linking".
I don't think most companies really make any contributions or modifications to the databases they use that they absolutely do not want to share back to the community.
(If using ReQL constitutes "linking" under AGPLv3, then that's a very serious matter. Perhaps re-licensing under LGPLv3 would make sense then.)
But overall, I think it's fair that they used AGPL. I especially like that they opted for the Affero version, since companies that do make useful changes can't just hold onto it , and not share it back.