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Why GPL instead of AGPL license? (monero.town)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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People who use GPLv3 want the code to stay open/libre under any circumstances. If this is the goal, why not use the AGPL instead, even for applications which are not served over a network?

This takes away the possibility that people integrate parts of your program into a proprietary network application, even if this seems improbable. There's nothing to loose with using this license, but potentially some gain.

Only reason I can think of is that AGPL is less known and trusted which may harm adoption.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I may or may not care whether the code gets integrated into a proprietary network project, depending on the particular FOSS project. If it’s some general purpose command line widget, for instance, I would probably prefer not to restrict its usage in that context. If it were a long-running back-end online service project like MongoDB, though, that would be a different story, because that’s the kind of thing AGPL was created for.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

GNU licenses aren’t about denying people from making money, they’re about ensuring that they share their code changes with everyone. AGPL was created to solve a new edge case concerning SaaS companies like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, etc.