alt Hacker NewsThe AGPL license is a no-go for me.
While it’s technically true that it’s an OSI license it’s mostly used to scare away competing cloud vendors from hosting the software, which isn’t in spirit of OSS.
Have you looked into the more modern choices?
Like the Business Source License that MariaDB created and uses or the Functional Source License that Sentry created as an improvement over the Business Source License? https://fsl.software/
Both those licenses have a fair source phase that automatically resolves into an open source phase over time.
Thus one gets the best of two worlds: An honest descriptive license for protecting one’s business model + a normal permissive OSS license that ensures longevity and prevents lock-in.
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Our philosophy in general is to go to a more open license over time (vs the other direction). So we might consider other more permissive OSI-approved licenses.
Would you be able to share why AGPL license is a no-go for you? I'm genuinely curious about your use case. In simple words, it'd require a company to open source their BemiDB code only if they made modifications and were distributing it to other users (allowing modifications and using it internally without any restrictions)
Because you want to take their hard work, modify it and not share it back to the community?
I'm not crying that "it's not for you".
You’re seriously calling out a perfectly valid OSS for not being “in the spirit of OSS”, and pitching for licenses that are explicitly NOT OSS?!
AGPL couldn’t be more in the spirit of OSS. The entire free software movement started to defend the _users_ freedom, not individual companies’.