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Re:How We're Building a Business to Last by chimeracoder on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:01PM (#15268040)
> I wonder if this could be done via licensing, i.e a commercial license that only kicks in when you offer the project as a service.

The AGPL can be used this way. The project is free and open source, but people wanting to sell it as a service will pay for a commercial license instead of using the AGPL.

Re:How We're Building a Business to Last by justincormack on Sunday September 17, 2017 @01:16AM (#15268336)
Only if they want to modify it and not give back. If people want to use the code as is AGPL doesn't really help.
Re:How We're Building a Business to Last by lewisl9029 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:28PM (#15272280)
And from the outside, it's nigh impossible to know if the source code for a hosted open-source product has been modified or not, unless they make it blatantly obvious, which makes the AGPL extremely difficult to enforce. In addition, a lot of great hosted open-source products are designed to be extensible through plugin architectures so that its functionality can be extended through code that lives outside of the core codebase, and AGPL can introduce a perverse incentive to close off the product for extension to the detriment of the quality of the code base and the experience of end-users, in the name of not circumventing the protections provided by AGPL.

That said, AGPL is still my go-to license to reach for when I build open-source products that can be self-hosted, but it's by no means a silver bullet, even for its intended purpose.

Re:How We're Building a Business to Last by TAForObvReasons on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:28PM (#15268097)
People understand what the AGPL requires. And for projects where there are alternatives with other license terms, like MIT or Apache2, the alternatives will be used. Adoption is stymied