alt Hacker News> especially on whether AGPLv3 would be a blocker for something you'd self-host in dev
AGPL3 shouldn't be a blocker for use with this sort of tool unless:
▪ someone is very paranoid about GPL infection (that is to say that they, or their bosses, have been taken in by some of the fear-mongering over the years)
▪ or they are intending to make the feature available as part of the their product/service (if it is a mail related/adjacent tool and they want to use this as a built-in self-test module) rather than just using it internally, in which case they might be subject to the full terms of the licence due to effectively directly linking the code.
To alay the concerns of that first group, perhaps include in you documentation a paragraph explaining that simply using it in a dev environment, with no redistribution, does not constitute linking.
If someone tells you "no one will use it commercially if you use GPL"¹, you always have the option (assuming all the code is yoursor contributors have signed over their relevant rights) of dual licencing GPL and commercial.
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[1] this usually means "I want to sell this with my service but don't want to pay or otherwise give back, please use a more permissive license so I can do that"
I do not see the issue here, either. My plan for developing the commercial add-on (a separate backend server) is for this gateway to connect to it using a REST API. So, if they need to use this, they can integrate it with their system the same way. There is nothing stopping anyone from using the open-source gateway and developing a compatible backend, since I will document that part.
For now I am focusing on phase 1, which is to make it rock solid. Only after that will I start doing that part. In this phase, I wanted to listen to the community to add missing features, but apparently it will not be easy :D
Thanks for your reply.
Edit: One crucial detail I should have mentioned: while the gateway engine is AGPLv3, all the native SDKs (Node, Python, Go, Java, .NET), Frontend and CLI are MIT licensed. This ensures a clean legal boundary; your application code only ever interacts with the MIT-licensed client, which talks to the gateway over the network. This should eliminate any 'GPL infection' concerns for standard CI/CD use cases.