Toward Copyleft Equality for All

Re:Toward Copyleft Equality for All by zeveb on Monday January 20, 2020 @04:10PM (#22102123)

I believe that this is arguing from a false premise: the reason that companies despise the AGPL is not, I think, that they fear that they fear accidentally violating copyleft and thus being forced to buy a proprietary license but rather than they simply want to have their cake and eat it too: copyleft for thee but not for me. They want to use software for free but not grant the rights they received to their own users.

Thus a provision reverting to a BSD-style license in case of proprietary licensing would, I believe, do nothing to encourage them to use it in the first place.

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Re:Toward Copyleft Equality for All by singron on Monday January 20, 2020 @06:52PM (#22103069)

In my experience, the copyleft provisions of the AGPL are misunderstood by just about everyone to be much more viral than they really are. E.g. "if there is some AGPL software on a workstation or server, we might have to release all source code in the company!"

I wouldn't be surprised if MongoDB has been spreading FUD for years to cause this.

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Re:Toward Copyleft Equality for All by munk-a on Monday January 20, 2020 @07:08PM (#22103150)

I agree with this, AGPL is aimed to be comprehensible in its permissiveness, but most folks don't know AGPL from GPL and, even with AGPL, there are ways to have infectious copy-left licensing if the raw binaries are directly linked into an application.

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