> We do not choose AGPL so we would not harm our users.

This is a first. If anything, it seems clear that a FLOSS license such as AGPL achieves exactly the opposite: is highly protective of the users' best interests, both in the short term and long term.

Could you elaborate on why do you think that users are harmed by standard, run-of-the-mill FLOSS licenses?

Depends on who you consider 'the users'. If you are a 'user' in the sense of an individual working on their own stuff, then yes, AGPL protects you a lot.

However, if you are a 'user' in the sense of a company wanting to make software to sell as a service, it doesn't protect you very much, and can make you vulnerable.

> However, if you are a 'user' in the sense of a company wanting to make software to sell as a service (...)

That does not meet the definition of "user", does it?

In addition, if that was the motivation behind that absurd claim, why not be honest and just say "we don't release our software under a FLOSS license because what we actually want is to keep it proprietary"?

It means ‘user’ in the sense of the person who is choosing what software to include in their work stack, and most software of this type is going to be used in a professional setting. If you use a license that most legal departments won’t let their developers use, your software won’t gain much adoption… which is especially important if you are planning on making money from your software. People aren’t going to be paying for support for their personal projects.

How does AGPL can make a company trying to sell a software* as service vulnerable?

*Assuming it's not a memory-store as a service, obviously.

I don’t know, but I do know my legal department says we can’t use it, and I have heard the same about many other companies.

Most legal departments don't allow for copyleft licenses. This is because most legal departments don't actually make their own legal determinations but instead rely on industry norms. And google set the stage here ages ago with their no-GPL (and especially, no-AGPL) policy.

However this is rather uniquely due to Google's monorepo infrastructure. Google quite literally has all its products in the same source code repository, being built and statically linked together to create a single system binary (or so I am told--I've never worked there). In this case AGPL would virally infect the rest of your code and you could find yourself in trouble. Even if they don't, they might get hit with a discovery request for the source code of some project to prove compliance, and in the process have to provide their entire monorepo and all its business secrets to the court. Etc. Etc.

But these are concerns which stem directly from Google's monorepo architecture. It's not generally true of the whole industry. And yet Google's fear of copyleft--rational though it may be in their particular instance--has been copied throughout the entire industry. 99% of the companies out there have nothing to fear from the AGPL. But hey, if you're some random in-house lawyer at company XYZ, who are you to question Google's legal precedent?

Using a non-OSI approved license hurts your users considerably more than AGPL (and this is coming from someone who generally doesn't like the AGPL). Legal teams are far less likely to approve licenses like the one you've chosen, than AGPL.

I could convince a legal team to allow an AGPL service, depending on how we were using it. It would be difficult to get them to allow us to use this license, and I definitely couldn't convince them to allow us to contribute to software using this license.

Effectively, you've ensured you won't have a community, because in reality the project is closed source, and dead if your company dies, which means it's not an option for me to consider.

This is not representative of my experience. AGPL is unconditionally banned at most companies where I know the answer to this question. They don't care if the license is OSI-approved, they care if it aligns with their business requirements and objectives. Most companies are not ideological about open source.

BSL is at least making an attempt to address the legitimate concerns of businesses -- both sides -- in a balanced and pragmatic way. I have no dog in this fight, being neither a BSL licensor nor licensee (nor AGPL for that matter), but having been party to the legal conversations at large companies I understand why BSL is generally considered to be more acceptable than AGPL. BSL may or may not be the right license for this software, I have no opinion, but businesses don't care about arguments from ideological purity. If BSL satisfies their requirements better than AGPL, and anecdotally all the evidence seems to support this notion, then they will go with BSL software.

To put it another way, if OSI is serious about being in the conversation about the future of software licensing, they must address the reasons so many companies refuse to adopt AGPL software.

I wonder how involved you've been in these kinds of discussions. I've run open source programs at companies, and worked together with the legal teams in terms of what was and was not allowed.

Transferring copyright to another company, without a contract with that company, for the most part is something a legal team isn't going to agree to. BSL only addresses one side's concerns, and it's not in your favor.

AGPL, when used for internal services that customers don't interact with, is generally not that difficult to get approved. How many companies are using mongodb, for instance?

I do not have any practical, first hand experience with either license. Re -agpl, i know for a fact that it is banned in corporations. We choose BSL to avoid this. Say if a team in amazon would want to use DF internally they could. I know for a fact that AGPL is a big no there. If we are mistaken and BSL is also banned then we will need to see what to do.

I hope people will understand the reason behind bsl. I hope people will see apache there and will help us to grow. Based on HN comments some already do.

As someone building software for a living I fully agree with your decision to not go full OSS. It’s always a hefty discussion but I feel most of the people only exist on the receiving end of software and do not have to worry how a license impacts real life distribution. Big corp (I’m from Germany) DOES hesitate to go with any form of non-Apache-2 licensed OSS software. In Germany often times OSS is even discouraged if there’s no commercial support for it.

I understand the emotions people have regarding licenses that do allow them to work with software as they please - but I also think it’s useless to argue around licensing of a software instead of focusing on the good it can do. Something being proprietary has NO impact on your choice to buy it when outside of the software world. Why does it here?

The problem you are pointing out is not the open source license, it's the lack of support. If they offered AGPL with a dual-license version and made a strong message about commercial support, they could please both crowds without compromises.

> I do not have any practical, first hand experience with either license.

I do have practical first hand experience with both. I can get a legal team to approve the use of AGPL, but I cannot get them to approve BSL, unless we've signed a contract with the company.

Having an understanding of the license, and some first hand experience seems like it would be a pretty important thing, when choosing it, especially for a business.

I don't want to enter in the merit of your company's choice, it's definitely up to you what license to use, but I'm confused about that statement around AGPL. How would AGPL harm users?

By preventing them from using dragonfly. Many companies prohibit from dev teams(aka our users) from downloading and using agpl licensed software.

The lawyers often ban AGPL at tech cos

Which means they may pay for an alternative to the AGPL.

More likely they'll ignore the s/w. Huge amount of talent is working in such companies. Using AGPL will practically exclude them from interacting with the s/w.

Also, smaller companies like to play safe. If FAANG with their million lawyers aren't touching it, why should I take the risk.

Because unlike FAANG you don’t have millions of engineers to create the software from scratch. Companies pay for databases (Oracle, Gemstone, MsSQL, anything at Amazon). Almost all the risks (price changes, maintenance costs, etc.) can be managed adequately via a long term enterprise contract.

Yes, we’re going through this right now

If that's your only concern, then why not dual license? Give your users the choice whether they want to follow the current license or the AGPL.

We may do it in the future. We will see if the community will accept Dragonfly with BSL. MariaDb were pretty famous and i do not remember any loud objections to their license.

I was quite excited to see Dragonfly. However now that the license has been pointed out, I won't be touching it with a 10 foot pole. I wish you the best of luck, but I'll never use it.

If it was AGPL I'd have been a happy camper though.

There were a lot of loud objections to their license, and remember that MariaDB the database isn't licensed that way (it's GPL), just the much less used MaxScale and CMAPI.