
Google's Internal AGPL Policy - verdverm
https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/
======
ryukafalz
Google’s allergic to copyleft licenses, so that’s about what I’d expect. But
smaller software companies, consider this a sign: want to be FOSS but don’t
want the tech giants to swallow your business? Go AGPL, they’ll avoid it like
the plague.

~~~
tony
> want to be FOSS but don’t want the tech giants to swallow your business?

I get the aesthetic and sentiment, but in practice this doesn't convey the
reality. Having a business link or incorporate your open source software
project isn't necessarily bad. At the very least, it's a social proof. There
could be sponsorships, patches sent back.

There plenty examples of permissively licensed software out there that
directly contradict this:

FreeBSD for Nintendo Switch and PS4, FreeNAS

Django, TypeScript, Jupyter. VSCode. Electron. Python. Ruby. CoreCLR. Windows
Terminal.

Anyone of these projects, someone could fork it, rename it, repackage it as
value added. It doesn't happen since the transaction incentivizes merging
contributions upstream - maintaining forked code has passive costs. Pushing it
back passes the burden (and also the benefit) of the changes back to the
project.

> Go AGPL, they’ll avoid it like the plague.

I feel when we're thinking about gatekeeping who and uses our software and
why, we're not really doing open source anymore.

In that case, writing commercial software license from scratch, or based off a
permissively licensed project, and not releasing the source is an option.

~~~
djaque
I license all of my software AGPL and the reason I do it isn't gatekeeping or
some theoretical argument about what software is. It's because I have put a
large amount of effort into this product and decided to release it for the
benefit of the community. I would feel taken advantage of if a company came in
and hoarded that software while making a profit off of it and never giving
back. The free market is great and all, but it's also OK to just ask that
people give you a fair deal when they use your code.

~~~
jsjddbbwj
If a company took your code and made a service people like and enjoy with that
code, how is that not benefiting the community? The bsd licence gave us the
iPhone. Doesn't that benefit mankind?

~~~
ryukafalz
Its users may like and enjoy it, but only ever as users. The community has
lost the right to shape the project as they wish. The software becomes a tool
of influence over its users. I don’t think that benefits them.

> The bsd licence gave us the iPhone. Doesn't that benefit mankind?

The BSD license gave Apple a start to build the iPhone; Apple gave us devices
that we aren’t given full access to even though we ostensibly own them. No,
I’m not sure that’s a net benefit for humanity.

~~~
jsjddbbwj
There is the option of buying Android. If people choose the iPhone it's
because they don't care about having full access to the phone, or even see
that as a positive because of malware concerns. So if so many people freely
buy iPhones, it's because they like them.

------
probdist
This is how RStudio and certain other great open source tools get bigcos to
pay for licenses. They are allergic to AGPL and therefore will happily pay for
alternative licenses for tools their employees demand.

------
lflux
Same thing inside Amazon. GPLv2 on a case-by-base basis, AGPL/GPLv3: don't
even ask. BSD/MIT: Go hog wild

~~~
bigiain
... and if it's got enough mindshare to be worth having, but is AGPL or some
other "too restrictive license", just reimplement (probably an old version of)
it's APIs from scratch, and use misleading marketing weasel-words to lock in
your existing users of other services who aren't paying enough attention.
<smirk>

------
gentleman11
I wish it was easier to monetize free software. I am making an Indy game right
now and it is hard enough to make money already with 7k+ games coming out per
year (plus, my third party assets don’t have a license that allows
redistribution in such a way)

~~~
jldugger
> I wish it was easier to monetize free software.

Well, you might ponder over this line from the policy:

> In some cases, we may have alternative licenses available for AGPL licensed
> code.

------
thayne
> any product or service that depends on AGPL-licensed code, or includes
> anything copied or derived from AGPL-licensed code, may be subject to the
> virality of the AGPL license

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the AGPL was that its virality only
applied to changes to the software, or software that was directly linked to
it. So if a product A used an AGPL licensed service over the network, that
would not require that A also be licensed as AGPL.

------
verdverm
The main reason I don't release with AGPL (and similarly red flagged licenses)
is so that corporations can adopt the project.

~~~
bigiain
That's a perfectly valid choice.

Other people's choice to avoid corporations from adopting the project without
giving anything in return is also a perfectly valid choice.

(You have a higher chance of having your project become globally used, other
people value that less than pull requests and/or money. And that's fine.)

~~~
kazinator
The AGPL burdens you with requirements related to simply running the program,
even if you're not a money-making corporation.

Say you want to put up some wiki or something, for some volunteer organization
of yours. If you run some AGPL thing and customize it in any way, you're
burdened with having to serve everyone the code.

Come on, are you saying that if some corporation uses your program that took
ten man-years of effort, and re-distributes the code due to making some
trivial one-line change, then they have given something adequate in return?

If you don't like corporations using stuff for free, then just put a proper
shareware license on it: "free for non-commercial use".

The motivation for the AGPL isn't about giving back to the community; it's
just a wrongheaded attempt to attack the problems caused by SaaS. Namely, that
users are tied to using programs whose installation is on remote equipment
they don't control, and whose behaviors are a blackbox.

~~~
bigiain
> you're burdened with having to serve everyone the code.

Yes, if that’s the option the author of the code chose. You are free to choose
some other code, or write your own. You have zero entitlement to use somebody
else’s code under conditions that suit you, over the wishes of the author. It
makes no difference whether the author(s) chose AGPL for reasons you like it
not, or if they did it out of philosophical purity or spite. They get to
choose. You get to choose whether to use their code or not under the rights
and conditions they grant you. Google have clearly worked this out and
codified it in their policies. If you think that’s putting some overly heavy
burden on you, that doesn’t change anything. Choose some other code or write
some yourself. Nobody owes you the right to use their code. Sorry.

~~~
kazinator
> _You have zero entitlement to use somebody else’s code under conditions that
> suit you._

Note that this sort of rhetoric is eerily familiar from the world of
proprietary software; and is largely absent in truly free software contexts
(BSD, MIT, ...). When similar entitlement talk comes up, it's usually in terms
such as not being entitled to free support (coding or whatever) in regard to
something available "as is".

~~~
bigiain
> and is largely absent in truly free software contexts

I curious about what you mean by "truely free software"?

My impression is there's a divide in "non-proprietary" software philosophies,
with Stallman out one end of the bellcurve on the "free as in speech" side,
and perhaps ESR out toward the other end closer to "free as in beer". That's
also close to the divide between "free software" and "open source software" in
my head. There re people who are perfectly happy to give huge codebases away
with almost no restrictions (for me the champion of this would be Larry Wall
and the Artistic Licence/GPL dual licensing he uses for perl), while there are
other people who are more politically or "freedom" motivated (like Stallman,
who champions AGPL like viralality because he believes its "right" and
"socially good").

Trying desperately to escape either of those outcomes are organisations (for
whom I have a lot of sympathy) like MondoDB and RedisLabs, who are trying to
build business models around large/expensive codebases and getting undercut by
"the cloud industry" who've found legal but probably unintended holes in the
licenses they released under. I don't know if RedisLabs' RASL or MongoDB's
SSPL will work out long term. I kinda hope they do, because I think it'll
allow a new kind of OpenSource/FreeSoftware to exist - projects the require a
team of engineers getting salaries paid to do the engineering - allowing
software to be created on a scale that loosely connected groups of individuals
are unlikely to be able to achieve. (I know the Linux kernel is an obvious
counter-example to that claim, but it's an outlier in the vast sea of open
source and free software projects out there.)

(And, regardless of the implications of works like "rhetoric" and
"entitlement", I can't see how _anybody_ could argue against a code/project
author being able to use whatever licensing they choose - including whatever
restrictions that places on people who want to use that code. Copyright law
allows them to refuse you to use their code at all. Any further rights they
grant you in a license are not something almost any other creative industry
grants. Nobody realistically complains about the burden LucasFilm is imposing
on them by the choice of what rights they grant you to use StarWars
copyrighted story/theme/images/whatever - you can't show StarWars to people
for free just because you're a volunteer or non profit organisation. Why
should someone else's C/Python/Java/Rust code be any different?)

~~~
kazinator
> _curious about what you mean by "truely free software"?_

"Free to do whatever you want, other than perpetrate plagiarism of the source
code by removing or replacing the author's identifying marks."

A good "is it truly free" litmus test is this question: is it attached to an
ideology which is rooted in preventing the existence of some kinds of software
in the world which bother the ideologists?

If so, it's probably not truly free software.

------
classics2
Many viral licenses are just demands for payment by other means. It’s not
really surprising to see companies recognizing it and refusing to pay the
asking price.

~~~
saagarjha
Yes, the payment is that you must contribute your changes back to the project.

~~~
m463
Dual-licensed code may be distributed with different restrictions to a paying
customer.

~~~
gary-kim
That's only possible if one entity has the rights to the entire codebase.

Personally, almost all my software is released under the AGPL and there is no
CLA so it cannot be dual-licensed, which is how I want it.

------
yokohummer7
> Do not attempt to check AGPL-licensed code into google3

What is this "google3" thing? Is this the name of their monorepo?

~~~
saagarjha
Yes.

------
rodgerd
Google: Unless we can get your free labour, we don't want your stuff.

------
lidHanteyk
Google also recoils from WTFPL, which may make it a more palatable license for
folks who don't agree with the AGPL's various quirks and features. Not that
AGPL is bad, but WTFPL is quite bare-bones.

~~~
brendyn
Presumably because using it is terribly reckless. It doesn't even contain a
standard disclaimer preventing the user from suing the distributor or
copyright holder.

~~~
loeg
You want the WTFNMFPL instead: [https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-
fuck-you-want-to-b...](https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-fuck-you-
want-to-but-it's-not-my-fault-public-license-v1-\(wtfnmfpl-1.0\))

~~~
tingletech
I can't find either on this list
[https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical](https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical)

~~~
loeg
The OSI isn't the arbiter of all things.

